Director’s word – Lauri Maijala
A person needs someone else. First, it needs a clother, a feeder and a caregiver. A tireless person who gives up his own so that the new person would feel safe and ready to get to know other people and treat them as equals.
In order to face the world outside the family, you need to have trust in the world. Trust that a person is good in the end, that cars stop at red lights, that the teacher’s job is to help, and that a person can do good deeds for others in the spirit of the purest altruism – just like that.
Trust in a person’s fundamental goodness makes good people. This requires the other person who is ready to act on behalf of the other person. The one who says everything is fine, you are enough, your scars are beautiful and everything will be fine, even if there is a constant storm raging in your heart and a dense fog humming in your head.
Happy is the one who says “I love you”. Happy is the one who hears “I love you”. Saying and receiving this sentence is a privilege that you only understand when it no longer exists, or when you realize it for the first time.
This performance tells me about two people who have been deprived of this basic security, who fall in love with each other in a cold landscape where there has been no room for love. Two human halves collide with each other and stick together. They get their childhood and youth – play and passion are the whole world.
Cathy is Heathcliff and Heathcliff is Cathy – and that’s good.
Then the snake slithers into paradise. The fears, shames and dreams of a (often) middle-class, sensible and adult life built into us by our society and history are rearing their heads.
Not even those who once could not imagine another reality are not safe from this force of nature. The play ends and we become adults – Cathy and Heathcliff, as well as all of us. We make choices that are appropriate to make, that make us belittle our youth – at worst, we deny that our former selves even existed. We cram the past into a coffin and hope to jump on the right train on the way to life’s vague end.
We often have to make these choices that determine the final direction of life in moments when we do not think clearly, because rarely if ever do we determine the time – life assigns them to us. Of course, happiness and serenity can be achieved – even in the middle class.
If we make our choices and accept them down to the bone, we are likely to live a balanced life. Some people even have to free themselves from the past in order to be happy.
But let them protect the one who denies himself three times. A person who has wallpapered their true self, history and passion between a rose wallpaper and a wall will sooner or later face their past. And when the chained past is once freed, it will haunt the door.
And when it comes – it comes with a frame around its neck. Especially when it comes to people like Cathy and Heathcliff, those yin and yang, light and shadow – life and death.
In Meilahti 19.2.2020
Lauri Maijala, director