It's one of the most instantly recognisable titles in English fiction, but when Wuthering Heights arrives at the Lyric Hammersmith next week, precious little else about it will be familiar. Because the theatre company Tamasha has taken Brontë, wholesale, to Bollywood. Its adaptation of the classic, 19th-century tale of thwarted, illegitimate and, on occasion, frankly imponderable love is relocated to 1770s Rajasthan, where Cathy and Heathcliff are reincarnated as Shakuntala and Krishan, clad in silks and spangles, and the story is set to an all-new Bollywood score.

Tamasha's co-founder and Wuthering Heights director Kristine Landon-Smith insists that “it's such a perfect marriage of story and genre, it seems almost obvious. When Brontë meets Bollywood, it really works.”

The play's writer, Deepak Verma, once known to the nation as Sanjay in EastEnders, decided after a trip to the region that the Rajasthani deserts were just as romantic, foreboding and unforgiving as the blasted heath of Brontë's imagining. “From there,” he says, “all the pieces fell into place.” The repressive, corseted Victorian culture of the novel found a perfect foil in the rigid caste strictures of Indian society. Hinduism provided additional illuminating parallels: the inviolably sacred nature of a brother-sister relationship and the haunting consequence of not completing funerary rites, for instance. In the creeping evolution of the East India Company into a controlling nation state, Tamasha also discovered an intriguing new light in which to cast Cathy's pursed-lipped, respectable husband, Edgar Linton, here renamed Vijay, a tax collector and puppet of the British ruling classes.

“The love that is fated is the absolute classic Bollywood formula,” Landon-Smith explains. She noted, on watching William Wyler's 1939, Oscar-winning film of Wuthering Heights, starring the Indian-born Merle Oberon and the permanently furrowed, slightly sweaty brow of a young Laurence Olivier, that “it's full of these immediately recognisable Bollywood close-up moments”. Wuthering Heights, you recall, is a story in which a woman dies of a prolonged fit of pique, ghosts pop up whenever there's a high wind, and at a hint of rain at least two characters will be sure to come down with consumption. The kind of fictive caper, then, to which the excesses of Bollywood seem uniquely suited.

First published in 1847 under the authorial pseudonym Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë's only novel has inspired a raft of adaptations, from the Spanish director Luis Buñuel's Abismos de Pasión in 1954 to an all-female Japanese opera, recently revived in Tokyo, and it has already been the subject of a large-scale, Bollywood interpretation, the 1966 India-wide release Dil Diya Dard Liya.

If these adaptations have met with a decidedly mixed reception, so too have a stack of high-profile attempts to splice Eastern form with Western content, such as Gurinder Chadha's luckless Jane Austen Bollywood spin in 2004, Bride and Prejudice.

“Crossovers fall down,” Landon-Smith says, “when they don't follow the transliteration through. It's vital that the original story remains absolutely visible, but you also have to deliver the Bollywood element. You have to hold both audiences in your mind at once. It's when the cultural specificity of the retelling is very real that the story can become truly universal.”

Tamasha should know. Now in its 20th year, it developed East is East, Ayub Khan-Din's stupendous social comedy of a mixed-race northern family, which had its premiere at the Royal Court in 1997 before becoming a hit indie film, and the company hasve produced a string of sell-out Anglo-Indian shows since.

Developing Wuthering Heights, however, has proved uniquely demanding. “We wanted it to sound authentically Indian,” Landon-Smith says, “but the songs also had to work within a Western musical theatre tradition,” which meant employing a three-tiered system of composers, arrangers and performers, and relaying samples between Basingstoke and Bangalore before prerecording the final score, which, in true Bollywood style, will be lip-synched on stage.

Pushpinder Chani, Krishnan/Heathcliff to Youkti Patel's Shakuntala/Cathy, has, surprisingly, found that skill the most difficult to master: “Lip-synching's way harder than it looks, but that's the key to Bollywood acting,” he chuckles, “that and trying not to look too stupid when you dance.”

“The landscape of the whole world changed with Slumdog Millionaire,” says Verma, who is determined to turn his play into a film. “The attention this is getting is just amazing.” And, whatever the fate of Tamasha's Wuthering Heights, he is probably right to predict, as India's economy continues to boom and its addiction to cinema shows no sign of waning: “Just wait. We haven't even touched the surface of this crossover phenomenon yet.”

Wuthering Heights is at the Lyric Hammersmith, W6 (0871 2211729), from Wed to May 23, then on tour

(www.tamasha.org.uk)

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010