Sally Wainwright: Heavens, Heathcliff's a girl

Sally Wainwright hates costume drama. Which is the reason, she tells James Rampton, her reworking of 'Wuthering Heights' for television has taken some striking liberties

If the television screenwriter Sally Wainwright has to sit through another bonnet-and-bustle period drama, she may be forced to reach for her Luger. A writer on such modern-day pieces as At Home with the Braithwaites, Playing the Field, Coronation Street and The Archers, she has had it up to here with what the director Alan Parker once called "Laura Ashley drama".

"I hate endless costume dramas," Wainwright declares, with a vehemence that brooks no contradiction. "It's a case of, 'Let's get out the dressing-up box again.' It's lazy and cheesy. Period adaptations are so boringly literal – and so cynical. I get annoyed that controllers commission them rather than new work.

"And, as a writer, I don't know what the challenge would be – all you do is read the book and nick the best lines from the person who wrote it. What's the point? Straight adaptations are very restricting and very frightening – I mean, how could you ever write as brilliantly as Emily Brontë?

"Also, everybody always says, 'The series was good, but not as good as the book.' Well, obviously. They're completely different media, so why try to force a square peg into a round hole?"

How much more interesting, Wainwright reckons, to put a modern-day spin on a literary classic. To that end, the Halifax-born writer has come up with an eye-catching new angle on one of our favourite novels. Sparkhouse, a three-part BBC 1 drama set in the Yorkshire Dales of today, is a reimagining of that eternal A-level set-text standard, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

The twist in Wainwright's reconfiguration of the story is that the sexes are reversed. In Sparkhouse, the Heathcliff figure is a female called Carol (acted by Sarah Smart). A wild, wanton and sexually magnetic young woman from the wrong side of the tracks, she is intoxicatingly in love with her more affluent neighbour, Andrew (Joseph McFadden). His bourgeois parents try to put a stop to the affair. Like her literary inspiration, Carol is mad, bad and dangerous to know. What she does to Andrew's corgi in a fit of pique could well cause mass jamming of the BBC switchboard.

According to the writer, "We don't expect women to be reckless – that's what makes this more exciting. For a character to be behaving irresponsibly and to be a woman goes against all expectations."

But just why has Wainwright chosen this path now? "Great stories can withstand any number of reinterpretations," she explains. "It's something writers have always done. Many of Shakespeare's plays, for instance, are based on other stories. If we do adaptations, they should be like this, turning the story into something different that succeeds on its own merits.

"The Alicia Silverstone film Clueless is a fantastic example, because it works in its own right. You don't have to know that it is based on Emma to enjoy it – but if you do, you enjoy it even more."

Derek Wax, the producer of Sparkhouse, echoes his writer's remarks. "Andrew Davies's version of Othello is equally strong," he asserts. "It takes the play's original themes and weaves them in with contemporary subjects such as racism in the Met – without diluting the power of Shakespeare. Davies also dares to change Shakespeare's ending – the Iago figure survives – and that proves much more interesting than a straight adaptation."

Movies such as William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, the dazzling Baz Luhrmann feature about the modern-day gangsters of Venice Beach, and Cruel Intentions, an imaginative reinvention of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the context of an American high school, have shown the way. Both successfully use something old to say something new.

Sparkhouse employs the same trick. Wainwright bends Wuthering Heights to her own ends. She takes the idea of social status that pervades the novel and uses it to make points about our own class-ridden society. "People are still very snobby and class-conscious," the writer reflects. "One of the driving forces of the drama is that Carol and Andrew aren't allowed to see each other because he's middle-class and she's dead rough. The idea of a passionate love that's thwarted by others is fundamental to many stories – think of Romeo and Juliet or The Winter's Tale. That's infinitely fascinating – and something everyone will be able to identify with."

The really important thing for any contemporary writer updating a classic text is to give viewers "added value": something that they would not glean from a literal rendition of the original novel. In this way, Sparkhouse embellishes Brontë's work by fleshing out the reasons for Carol's Heathcliff's wildness. Wainwright invents a dark family secret that has shaped her character.

"In the novel, Heathcliff is such an evil bastard, he's irredeemable," the writer says. Whenever I read it, I come away hating him. But in Sparkhouse, I wanted to explain why Carol is so damaged. I hope she emerges as more likeable than him."

Wax chimes in that "Carol is a more attractive character than Heathcliff. We root for her because she's feisty and courageous. Viewers will relate to her and understand where she's coming from – she doesn't have the same advantages as a nice middle-class boy like Andrew."

In the end, what distinguishes Wainwright's reading of Wuthering Heights from say Peter Kosminsky's flat movie version in which Ralph Fiennes just brooded for two hours, is the fact that she has merely drawn on the novel as a starting point for her drama, rather than as an end in itself.

"At the heart of Wuthering Heights," Wax observes, "there are big moral choices – do we do what we want to do or what our parents expect us to do? That is a perennial theme – every teenager will recognise it – and it's why people keep coming back to the novel. But Sally has only used that element of Wuthering Heights as a springboard to tell a fresh and arresting story.

"Brontë's novel is strong enough source-material to bear any number of contemporary reworkings – few other works could support reinterpretation by artists as diverse as Laurence Olivier, Kate Bush and Cliff Richard.

Wainwright describes Wuthering Heights as "one of those novels that just gets inside your brain – it has a massive emotional impact on its readers. It's about a love that is so powerful, it goes beyond normal understanding, as well as beyond the grave. But Brontë presents it so convincingly, you instantly buy into it. You don't know how it's working on you – you just know that it is. It's like a fantastic piece of music."

And now Wainwright has composed an intriguing variation on that well-loved tune.

'Sparkhouse' starts on BBC 1 on Sunday