A dedicated purveyor of passion on stage, over the years the director Emma Rice has served up love illicit (Tristan and Yseult), love furtive (Brief Encounter) and love demented (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), to name three hits.

Now, in a production first seen at the Bristol Old Vic last autumn, she gives us love thwarted – the wild, unconsummated devotion between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff which Emily Brontë bequeathed the world in 1847, a year before her death.

Given how popular Bronte’s bleak classic remains you’d think that theatres would be inundated with star names incarnating the ardent pair, who are brought together by fate (he’s a foundling, taken in by Earnshaw senior, and treated as a favoured son) yet divided by wrong-headed, status-conscious matches. This century, though, apart from a few regional outings and a Bollywood version, the book has surprisingly stayed on the shelf.

I can’t say that either Lucy McCormick as the tormented woman of the Yorkshire moors or Ash Hunter as Cathy’s brutalised kindred spirit leave a lasting impression, albeit the former makes a magnificently arresting entrance, cracking a whip and screaming.

McCormick enacts the famous early vignette of ghostly gothic fright, knocking at a window and pleading to be let in, with due mad-eyed excess. The only issue is that an unsympathetic spirit of bedlam then haunts her every look. Our heroine’s turbulence is further embellished with a shouty, sweary rock number. Eat your heart out Kate Bush.