Review: Humiseva harju

A reinterpretation of Emily Brontë’s classic breaks the shackles of a wooden epoch

I didn’t really know what I was going to see when I stepped into the auditorium of the Helsinki City Theatre’s main stage. I knew about the Humming Ridge, the period of events and the place where the story takes place, and thanks to Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, I concluded that Cathy and Heathcliff are adventuring in the story. Oh, and that the classic work has been adapted for television and film in addition to plays, musicals and operas. For the first time, my road went to the Brontë moors.

Simplistic, barren, timeless and bloody – these are perhaps the words I would use to describe the Helsinki City Theatre’s Humming Ridge. In this play, the crinolines do not swing and the taffeta rustles. The stage adaptation of the classic by Jo Clifford, directed by Lauri Maijala, dismantles everything unnecessary and brings to the fore a harrowing love that is balanced between reason and emotions.

The play does not feel like a novel published in 1847, but is here and now. The physicality takes the viewer’s breath away and forces them to think about the number of bruises caused by concrete throws and clashes in the play.

Oona Airola, who plays the lead role, Catherine Earnshaw, shines in her role. As he runs along the moors, you can feel both the forces of nature and the emotions that are even greater. Catherine’s multifaceted brother, Hindley Earnshaw, is played by Markku Haussila. The man’s story of growing from his father’s shadow to an adult who is lost even to himself is absolutely harrowing to watch – amazing from Haussila. And Mr. Heathcliff’s outcast’s journey to adulthood by colliding with the glass ceilings of class societies. Ugly ugly and gallantly handsome work by Markus Järvenpää.

THE PLAY IS embedded with a lot of symbolism and ambiguous solutions that bring the humming Harju closer to the present day. I didn’t find all of the solutions terribly significant, and the work would have been even more cohesive by removing unnecessary and unnecessarily emphatic symbolism.

The atmospheric music also worked excellently at some points, but on the other hand, the well-progressing play was lame. One of the perhaps small, but surprisingly significant things in the play was the soundscapes, which created almost dreamlike moments in the whole, where reality and the play merged into one.