Highway Crossing Or A Tale Of A Golden Fish (2010)

The age of access is bringing with it a new type of human being. The young people of the new ‘protean’ generation are comfortable conducting business and engaging in social activity in the worlds of electronic commerce and cyberspace and they adapt easily to the many simulated worlds that make up the cultural economy. Theirs is a world that is more theatrical than ideological and more oriented towards a play ethos than towards a work ethos.

The play is about the possibility of love. In Highway Crossing or A tale of a Golden Fish the feelings of a young couple are tested by the dangerous lure of an unimaginable amount of money.

Lost in the woods on a stormy night, Laura and Roland seek refuge in a farmhouse where their host Oswald offers Roland one billion dollars for his fiancée. The money is real and Oswald claims it is a miracle gift given him by a golden fish in the lake. Already a huge hit in many other countries this remarkable Estonian play is a dark comedy about human nature and the choices we make at a moments notice.

It is not important whether the world of Tatte’s characters is located in Tallinin, New York or Berlin, because when it comes to dreams and love we are more similar than the geographical distances may at first have us believe.

In an epoch when the bulk of new drama offers us images of harsh and estranged, dirt-andblood- coloured lives, where close relationships are destined to failure, Tatte’s writing gives us a chance to live in a world where values exist.

On first appearance Tatte’s plays seem to be very simple, but this simplicity is deceptive. The fluent and easily spoken dialogue tricks the reader or the viewer into a net of multi-level verbal misunderstandings and mental air pockets, from which one doesn’t try to escape. It’s good to be trapped in that net. It’s a game.