STAGE productions of Wuthering Heights have all the success rate of England managers at major football tournaments.

Come the next one to be tasked with defying the evidence of history, hope anew abounds that this finally could be the time to finish all those years of, if not hurt, at least disappointment.

Apparently the popularity of Emily Bronte’s novel has soared anew on the wings of the Twilight teen phenomenon, “so now is the perfect time for a Hull Truck revival,” says the Hull Truck writer-and-director team of Jane Thornton and John Godber.

Thornton’s fast and furious adaptation was premiered in 2003 with its distinctive format of an omnipresent cast of five. In 2007, it died a death at the hands of director Sue Dunderdale in unquestionably the worst repertory production of the past decade at York Theatre Royal, a ribald show more doomed than the lovers.

Now Mr and Mrs Godber are giving it the chance to rise from the grave, still as Five Go Mad On the Yorkshire Moors, and with the USP of a “host of TV faces performing an iconic Yorkshire love story”.

And so, no sooner her mother Kay Mellor left the building in a hot air balloon in A Passionate Woman, than Gaynor Faye plays another passionate woman opposite her fellow Coronation Street alumnus, Rupert Hill.

Last seen on the Yorkshire stage in another turbulent trial of a love story, When Harry Met Sally, Hill here he plays a dishy, dishevelled Heathcliff to her rather more unexpected Cathy Earnshaw.

Stuart Wade, once Emmerdale’s Biff Fowler, is back on Yorkshire farming terrain as Hindley, and the cast is rounded off by two Hull Truck favourites Fiona Wass and Frazer Hammill.

Designer Pip Leckenby gives them an all-purpose moorland with a sky of scudding clouds, a grave stone, four chairs and a central props box-cum-seat beneath a broken frame.

Once they have entered in a portentous babble of overlapping voices – dressed as if for a Mummers’ play – the five never leave the stage (save for the interval). Godber’s intense production takes the form of a piece of storytelling, not far removed from the reportage style of Greek drama, with initially brief flurries of heightened drama that gradually grow longer, less stilted and more brutal as the night progresses.

This is typically economical and brisk theatre in Hull Truck tradition but it struggles to build up a head of dramatic steam in the first half. Meanwhile, the use of the cast for sound effects has a collective impact, unlike the stylised, no-contact violence that is too humorously redolent of a touring Victorian melodrama.

“There is a lot of death and illness in the play and we need to get that across,” says Godber. “The relationships, the way that people are with each other, is also very harsh. In that way, the text is very modern.”

Carbolic soap opera, you might say, but alas Wuthering Heights still doesn’t hit the heights.

Wuthering Heights, Hull Truck Theatre, until Saturday. Box office: 01482 323638.