Using the F-word in a modern adaptation of Wuthering Heights arguably makes sense, but the racial slurs are less convincing
"It's a shock to realise the extremity of what's gone on," says Ellen, the narrator of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as her stormy tale draws to a close. You can imagine that BBC Radio 3 listeners were saying much the same thing over a restorative sherry on Sunday after the genteel network broadcast a new adaptation which embellished the original with the F-word.
In a move to ditch what he sees as the novel's reputation as a cosy love story, and to restore the violent shock of the book when it was published in 1847, writer and director Jonathan Holloway has the young lovers reaching for expletives, while other characters taunt Heathcliff with racist jibes.
The lively language began early in the adaptation, broadcast from 8pm. Radio doesn't have a watershed in the same way as television's 9pm rule, and it was startling to hear Heathcliff and his tormentor Hindley Earnshaw swearing like Gordon Ramsay so early in the evening as they tussled over a horse.
"Fuck off," Hindley growls, "you're not 'avin' my 'orse." Heathcliff bellows: "I won't hit you back, you fucker." The original scene has the young men exchanging milder insults ("Off, dog!"), and it is hard to imagine today's readers – latching on to the novel for its portrayal of a love that respects no boundaries, not even death – getting the full impact of insults such as "imp of Satan".
The addition of swearing here is defensible: Heathcliff refers in the original to his habit of cursing, and Brontë's manuscript used blanks in some particularly heightened exchanges as if, even publishing under her alias Ellis Bell, she couldn't print everything she wanted her obsessed, cruel characters to say.
Other linguistic innovations in this production were less convincing, though, sitting uneasily in an otherwise impressive and faithful adaptation. Holloway has Hindley calling Heathcliff "pikey scum, you scrounging black bastard" and Mr Linton describing him as "a wicked little wog of some kind". Here, Brontë has already done the work for us, and the insults are vicious enough in her words: Heathcliff repeatedly called a gypsy and casually dehumanised as "it" when he first arrives at Wuthering Heights. The fear and mistrust of the outsider needs no underlining.
But it was Catherine's use of the F-word that felt most like an empty shock gesture. It came in her dizzyingly passionate description of how she loves Heathcliff, and is a pivotal moment in the plot which lurches us into the next phase of exquisite misery. In the original, Catherine cries that if all the world remained, yet Heathcliff "were annihilated, the universe would turn into a mighty stranger".
Holloway has her saying that if Heathcliff were annihilated "I would wish the whole fucking universe burned to a cinder". It was the only duff note in Natalie Press's otherwise haunting portrayal of Catherine, and sounded absolutely ludicrous, smashing the poetic beauty and structure of the speech.
Emily Brontë already pushed the literary boundaries of what could be said, imagined and felt by her lovers as they teeter on the edge of an emotional abyss that will consume them both. Her novel, pulsing with life and feeling, doesn't need improving or modernising; the power of its dark, distracting beauty is a timeless, unstoppable thing.