Once the musicians have assembled at the back of the bare stage a Figure steps out and cracks a whip.  Loudly. Emma Rice has taken charge of the evening.  And we are off at high speed in a juggernaut of a play that can turn on a sixpence, thanks to its fine tuning and consummate stagecraft.

The figure with the whip is the West Yorkshire Moor itself, turned into a character in this powerful adaptation of Emily Bronte’s masterpiece. But the hearts of people of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights are lashed as much by their own emotions as their bodies are by the tempest. Hell is all too readily other people. Love hurts, Hope deludes, Happiness is rare, Death is all around.

The audience is given a brief introduction to these doomed characters with their complex relationships and unhelpfully “similar names”.

“CONCENTRATE!”  We are told. “No one said this was going to be easy.”

The action begins: Nice but dim Mr Lockwood, new to the area and its ways, is caught in a ferocious storm. He knocks on the door of Mr Heathcliff’s Wuthering Heights and begs plaintively for shelter and a cup of tea, oblivious to the dour owner’s 1000 mile stare. Lockwood’s buffeted uncomprehending distress and bathetic craving for tea, have something of a Monty Python sketch about them. Suggested by actor Sam Archer’s possibly not coincidental resemblance to John Cleese himself.

But gaining shelter doesn’t bring peace. The poor fellow’s night is disturbed when Catherine, the love of Heathcliff’s life, bangs on his window and the house is in uproar. Catherine, we soon learn, died many years ago, but is kept a ghostly prisoner on the moor by Heathcliff’s undying love. Or is it hate? Or both?

Their story is told, not by Nelly Dean as in the novel, but by the Moor itself. It declaims, sings, and dances in various combinations of the cast, who never rest as the Moor itself never rests. Music from the on-stage band underlines the action and emotions in a range of styles from Folk to Rock.  The audience cheers when the live Catherine Earnshaw belts out an impassioned stadium anthem, complete with mic drop. This is extremely physical theatre, which doesn’t recognise boundaries or genres. Nor does it shirk showing violence against the young and women. But perhaps the emotional violence is even more disturbing.

Emma Rice’s production revels in the possibilities of the Lyttelton stage, which is mostly bare to allow the sometimes furious but tightly choreographed action to speak for itself. Twisted trees are made from light wooden chairs. A minimal section of wall – one door, one window – is wheeled in and reversed as required. Props are spare and ingenious: menacing dogs are snapping jaw bones on edging tools, birds are the fluttering pages of small books held aloft on poles.