Details

Hamilton's gritty yet humorous play combines disappointment and disillusionment in a plot that follows a doomed affair in a psychiatric hospital. Showing both the therapeutic and destructive power of literature thorough one patient's infatuation with Wuthering Heights, Hamilton weaves grisly realism with the surreal wanderings of the unstable minds of characters struggling between real and fictitious worlds. Long-term psychiatric patient Ruth has read Wuthering Heights forty-nine times and is the star of the Therapy Unit's poetry workshop. As she nurses her teddy-bear, Heathcliffe, in a psychiatric hospital in York, she recalls her former life in a ward in Bridlington, and her doomed affair with Bernard Whittaker, a thirty-seven year-old fellow patient from Leeds. Ten, (or is it twenty?) years earlier, Bernard is obsessed with anti-submarine warfare in WW1 and hallucinates that he is being visited by a young German submariner called Wulf, who keeps trying to persuade him to join him on his U-boat. Bernard is very tempted but is constantly drawn back by his deep attachment to the hospital cuisine.

Creatives/Company

Author: Peter Hamilton