Review: Humiseva harju

The moor is strength
Still, love tears the people of the Humming Ridge to pieces.

The opening image of the Helsinki City Theatre’s big stage is captivating. A swarm of human-sized ravens on the floor, a girl on top of the high stage element in the middle stage, who soon rushes from one stage to another, to the one that passes through the front of the auditorium. He immediately takes over the space. And the ravens, they scratch according to his whistle.

Such is Catherine, the Humming Ridge, a farmhouse on the Yorkshire moor. Untamed, passionate, dominant with his mere presence. Even a nasty one when necessary.

This woman is in charge of Earnshaw’s household, even though the single father tries to be the master of the household and guide both his daughter and her brother Hindley to the right path.

The setting of Cathy, the whole family, the whole moor, the whole play is upset when father Earnshaw brings home from his trip to Liverpool a “souvenir”, an unreeded, dirty, unspoken street boy.

Heathcliff has stepped onto the scene. Or rolled, because that’s what he literally does when he rolls from the grandstand ramp to the stage.

Cathy has been given a counterforce equal to her. He will measure up to the play, until the end of his life. To love, not to love, to love… Hate, not hate…

Lauri Maijala’s direction of Emily Brontë’s classic The Humming Ridge is a stunning performance. The airport stage is filled with a hurricane of emotions with only ten actors, one musician and Katariina Kirjavainen’s rather loose set design, tailored to the physical expressiveness of the performance. There is room to frolic.

Catherine and Heathcliff are in the focus of the direction, but Maijala also gives meaning to the supporting characters with her thoughts. Hindley is the villain in a play where there are hardly any good guys, unless you count Earnshaw’s housekeeper and nanny Nelly Dean as such.

The lack of goodness is horrible in life, but on stage it is a delicacy. The mostly selfish people of the humming ridge fight for their territories and roar in their passionate emotions so powerfully that no one is spared unharmed. Love is striving, and Maijala and her wonderful ensemble of actors show us so that the pulse beats fast both on stage and in the audience.

The stage design and the direction are emphatically twofold. The hour and a half before the intermission takes place in the childhood and teenage years of the protagonists in Earnshaw’s Humming Ridge and Heaths, the second half in Linton’s Rastaslaakso mansion, where Cathy has, after Heathcliff disappeared to the world, settled as Edgar Linton’s wife. The physical intensity of the play drops clearly on the second side, which is why the events in the hilariously ambiguously decorated milieu of the Linton manor subside at times to just lounging.

Calm before the storm. Heathcliff returns. So the ending is again very powerful in terms of expression, even though there is no more running, jumping and tearing. Now they are just tearing hearts out of their chests.

If actress Oona Airola has not already been praised (and awarded) for her work on the big screen and theatre, then her performance as Cathy of the Humming Ridge seals the fact that the shelves of the adjective store are emptied for good. I’ll only use one from there: stunning. The lovely and strong ones have been sold a long time ago.

Markus Järvenpää, who plays the role of Heathcliff, will not be tamer at all. Fierce, even frighteningly present.

The fierce charge of these two creates an atmosphere on stage where it is good for the entire ensemble to play compelling but meaningful roles. Leena Rapola’s Nelly, Matti Olavi Ranin’s father Earnshaw, Sonja Pajuoja’s Isabella, Markku Haussila’s Hindley and all those other sharply drawn characters – not a single one runs idle.

Neither is the multi-instrumentalist Mikko Helenius, who pops on stage throughout the performance and sometimes stays longer. He throws funny musical injets into the narrative (for example, Kate Bush’s opening chords of Wuthering Heights on a grand piano – it couldn’t be avoided!) and in other places a kind of score music to complement the atmosphere.

In the City Theatre’s version, which has been dramatised by the Scottish theatre multi-talent Jo Clifford, Maijala has added a few impressive vocal numbers as her own. In some other case, such a thing could turn into over-gluing, but not now. Three of the four songs are composed by Mikko Helenius, and they fit seamlessly into the whole. Perhaps precisely because the composer himself is, concretely, inside the performance. The lyrics of the songs are not far-fetched either, they are from the poetry of Emily Brontë and her sister Charlotte.

The only song that is deliberately outside is the rough blues ballad Vaasankatu, composed and written by Soili Jäppinen, which Markku Haussila handsomely pulls off after Hindley’s life management has slipped downhill.

The final image of the humming ridge gets stuck in the retina and consciousness for a long time. This was also the case in Maijala’s previous play directed by Maijala for the big stage at the City Theatre, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

Now, the two scenes that have dominated their own halves merge into one more when the manor interior is torn open: Heathcliff on the ramp in the middle of the auditorium, Catherine almost on the horizon on the other ramp of the humming ridge. All in one view: moors of moors and eternal but impossible love. Sob and wow.