Cathy Marston is an international choreographer. But when she was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne her parents so loved Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights that they named their daughter after Heathcliff’s star-crossed lover.

Like millions of others, Cathy has been to Haworth; she has stood at the ruins of Top Withens and gazed across the unfolding moorline of the hills, trying to feel what Emily Bronte felt all those years ago.

This week Cathy was starting work on choreographing a new ballet version of Wuthering Heights for Switzerland’s Bern Ballet where she has been director for nearly a year. After graduating from the Royal Ballet School, which she joined in 1992, she joined the Zurich Ballet and spent six years in Switzerland.

“The problem in Bern is I am fighting snobby critics who don’t like narrative stories, but I have always wanted to do Wuthering Heights,” she said.

“What’s really great about the idea of putting it on in Bern is that the people there have no preconceived ideas about what it should be, whereas in Yorkshire people are used to it.

“I am going to sit down with my scenario writer. The story will come down to this essentially earthy relationship, which continues to exist after death. I feel it is a love story that transcends any time,” she said.

Cathy returned to London from Switzerland in 2000 to become a freelance choreographer and dancer. Until 2007 she designed ballets for companies in the UK, USA, Switzerland and Cuba.

In 2002 she was made the first associate artist of the Royal Opera House and at the end of her tenure she formed her own company, The Cathy Marston Project. It toured the UK in 2006 with a triple bill of her work.

Cathy’s composer for Wuthering Heights will be Dave Maric, who worked with her on her production of Ibsen’s Ghosts and her latest piece of work for Leeds-based Northern Ballet Theatre, A Tale Of Two Cities.

Cathy said it was her idea to translate Charles Dickens’s novel, set in the time of the French Revolution, from the page to the stage in a 90-minute ballet.

She said: “It’s very important for Northern Ballet to have a title that people will recognise and come to. The story has been in my head since I was a girl. I love the beginning and the end of the novel – the best lines ever.”

How does she evoke, “It was best of times, it was the worst of times”, and, “It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to, than I have ever known”, in ballet?

“The first line is difficult,” she said. “You can show the contrast between the two places (London and Paris). The last sentiment you absolutely can do and that’s why I was especially drawn to it as a ballet.

“Through dance you build up tension and drama and then this feeling of peace. The novel is so dense but Sydney Carton’s last words are so simple that you remember them. That’s what you can do with dance. The choreography is dense and pacy; you get the feeling of inevitability and fate,” she added.

A Tale Of Two Cities, moving between England and France over a period of 30 years, during which momentous historical events occur, might seem more suited to the silver screen than the stage. Extensive cuts were necessary to get to the tale’s dramatic core.

“The most important theme is identity. Charles Darnay wants to become an Englishman and get rid of his past (as a French-born aristocrat). Sydney Carton wants to change to become like Charles at the end,” Cathy said. This is because he loves Lucie Manette, Charles’s wife.

Cathy’s show will not be a dance version of Les Miserables, which was based on a Victor Hugo novel anyway. It will show via different dance routines the conflict that unites and divides the three main characters.

“When I make steps or movements I make lists of words to describe what I am after. For the dance scenes in Paris I wrote “blade, slash, spike, pierce, stab” to define the qualities of edge. The dance scenes in England have more of a “curvy, softer” outline,” said Cathy.

What she loves about Northern Ballet Theatre is that their dancers are attuned to the demands of narrative story-telling – unlike some of their counterparts in Europe and, it has to be said, in this country too.

“So few dancers are trained these days in this kind of acting, but these guys are. Dance has become all about abstract shapes. Very few learn about character movement to differentiate one character from another,” she added.

Northern Ballet Theatre’s premiere of A Tale Two Cities is on at West Yorkshire Playhouse from August 30 to September 6, starting at 7.30pm. Tickets are available from (0113) 2137700.