Review: Wuthering Heights, Northern Ballet, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

In tandem with dramaturge Patricia Doyle, he tightens up the story, jettisoning much of the second generation from the novel to heighten the love triangle of moorland interloper Heathcliff (Javier Torres), hilltop farmer's daughter Cathy (Dreda Blow) and the gent from the big house, Edgar Linton (Nicola Gervasi).

Shedding the density of detail in turn aids the novel's transformation into a dance work built around emotion and the physical outpouring of uncontrollable feelings. The rough, wild love of Cathy and Heathcliff plays out on the bleak, windy moors, in Henry Moore monochrome colours in Ali Allen's set, where the one tree is bent by the weather and stripped of leaves. The choreography here is rugged, the clothes loose, the dancers' feet hammering the floor to Schonberg's music.

By contrast, dancing on pointe takes over for the more rigid Linton world of Thrushcross Grange, the clothes formal, the choreography refined, the game of badminton somewhat arch. Except when Torres's newly gentrified Heathcliff – the show's stellar performer – maltreats Rachel Gillespie's broken butterfly, Isabella Linton. In the production's best moment, he has eyes only for Cathy as he shoves Isabella around the wedding dancefloor.

Nixon makes a beautiful, flowing connection between the young Cathy and Heathcliff (Ayami Miyata and Kevin Poeung), as they roll off and their older selves roll on. Later, as Torres's Heathcliff withers in the snow, the young lovers return, conjoined for eternity.

Wuthering Heights, Northern Ballet, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds,tonight at 7.30pm; tomorrow, 2pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.uk

Coming next in Yorkshire from Northern Ballet: Romeo And Juliet, Sheffield Lyceum Theatre, September 14 to 17; Bradford Alhambra Theatre, October 11 to 15. Box office: Sheffield: 0114 249 6000 or sheffieldtheatres.co.uk; Bradford, 01274 432000 or bradford-theatres.co.uk