The cobbler’s children have no feet

The Cobbler’s Children Have No Feet is a family tale about the Böök family. In the frame story set in the late seventies, the psychologist Maria / Masa starts to unwind her life’s and her family’s story to a casual friend. In the remembered passages which go back and forth in time, unhappy turns of events in the family members’ lives are revealed. One by one they are shown losing their mental balance.
Maria’s grandparents Ukki and Baba, immigrants who fled from Russia, represent the oldest generation in the family history: Uncle Jukka suffers from epilepsy, grandmother Baba with all her wounds and bruises is dependent on her daily morphine injection. In the end, however, ten years of hospital care help her conquer her addiction.
Maria has a visually gifted and sensitive brother Mikael whose artist father can’t bear his highly creative work. The father suffers from a permanent sense of inferiority and a lack of respect even though he, too, has made a name for himself as an artist. The whole family becomes a target for the father’s tantrum and his sexist jokes. Most painfully they gnaw on his wife, Maria’s mother and their son, Mikael.
Mikael starts to live in his own world and runs away from home. He spends a part of his life being force-fed in a mental institute. The artist father moves to Italy. Maria’s mother has become apathetic, she misses her son (and her husband) and during the course of the play starts taking antidepressants until she has an overdose. – Maria tires to save everyone.
At the end of the play Maria gets to know Marko, a communist who likes his drink. They start a serious relationship and soon Maria expects a child from him. Marko and Maria’s father immediately recognise each other as soul mates. Marko cultivates joking below the belt and spends most time on pub crawls on which he often loses himself in the company of other women. Maria waits at home longing for him. She starts to more and more resemble her own mother.
In the Böök family hell everyone is given a voice – both the big-mouthed men with an inferiority complex and a worker’s background as well as the sensitive, civilised women who sink into apathy or drug addiction. The atmosphere of the play moves from Russian romance and the smell of incense of the orthodox belief to the student and artist life of the 70s with its revolutionary communist songs and its creative frenzy.