Review: Humiseva harju

Lauri Maijala’s lush interpretation searches for the cause of evil The love story in Emily Brontë’s novel The Humming Ridge has been condemned from the outset due to class differences and different origins. This theme has been the starting point for many adaptations of the work. What else can you find in the story?

Already Clifford’s stage adaptation under Lauri Maijala’s direction is shaped into a performance that observes both the human mind and his actions. Before the actual start of the play, a ragged person walks on the edge of the auditorium, begging, shaking his mug. The sight is probably familiar from the streets. A stranger, a stranger, a different person who could not afford to buy a theatre ticket. A moment later, he runs to the stage and from there to the ramp built deep into the stands. He is Heathcliff, a stranger who only gets the life of the moorland messed up by appearing there.

Maijala’s Humming Ridge is a timeless psychological study that explores the tools of an innocent child’s growing up. It shows what makes evil germinate in anyone, what kind of actions the power makes and how superficial life with its rejections can become. The interpretation does not preach, but dares to pick up hints from the lush stage text. At first, we are in the milieu of the 1800s, and after the intermission, in a clinical-looking hall where the television spews images of storm damage in the tropics. Leena Rapola’s servant Nelly is present or at least available all the time. He helps and understands, patches and cleans, is colorlessly good, a necessary balancer.

The lushness of the performance is created by the movement made possible by Katariina Kirjavainen’s set, Mikko Helenius’s music present throughout the play, Eradj Nazimov’s wild soundscape and William Iles’ play of lights. In this landscape, people live, die, hear voices, wander like ghosts and sing touchingly in Sari Suominen’s insightful costumes, which spill tragically comic stains.

The entire performance is musically paced, both in Oona Airola’s Katherine and Markus Järvenpää’s passionately tragic love of Heathcliff and in Markku Haussila’s marriage of Hindley and his wife Frances (Vuokko Hovatta). Sonja Pajunojan Isabella is a naïvely bubbling spring as an instrument of love between Heathcliff and Katherine, and she dries up in her grief. Rauno Ahonen’s foul-smelling doctor, Matti Olavi Ranin’s mystical grief Mr. Earnshaw and Matti Rasila’s shooting-loving Mr. Linton are the basis for the pulse of the new era.

Above all, this HummingRidge is thought-provoking, but also moving with a dense atmosphere. It makes you laugh, wonder and its final scene makes you swallow and bite your cheek.