Review: ¿America?
ERKKI SAARELA PASSES ON THE FO TRADITION TO THE NEXT GENERATION
Helsinki City Theatre’s ¿America? Built in the style of market theatre
As a genre, farce usually brings to mind something light. In a farce, you can laugh, you don’t have to think unnecessarily, the performance is just light entertainment in an unrealistic way.
The Italian Dario Fo (b. 1926), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997, also has a farce in his conception of theatre, but it has been customary to trademark it as a “Dario Fo farce”. Now the audience is laughing, the abdominal muscles are being tested, the tear ducts are opening. Even unintentionally. But at the same time, the text always has a strong basis in reality. Fo commented on contemporary politics and especially on the Catholic Church and churchmen in a merciless, unembellished and popular way.
When people talk about Fo’s plays in Finland, theatre lovers start to think of Erkki Saarela’s mischievous character. Saarela, who is approaching the age of sixty, toured the country and the worlds in the 1970s and 80s with Fo’s Mysterio Buffo monologue.
Now he has arranged, directed and staged Fo’s tribute to the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the new world, America, written in 1992.
Niko Saarela, the director’s son, is also involved in the Helsinki City Theatre’s performance. Saarela’s wonderful genetic heritage of the Fo interpreter is passed on directly in the descending generation.
A celebration of acting
The play is faithfully built in the genre of Fo’s market theatre. An indicative set scene, a small group of actors, few effects and at the same time an abundance of story, twists, events, surprises.
Niko Saarela and Sami Uotila are sailors dressed in simple costumes. On the ship of Christopher Columbus of Genoa, they drift through the equatorial islands, shipwrecking off South America. People rescue themselves to the mainland using pigs as handy floats. On the Caribbean Sea, you can find Puerto Rico and from there you can whisper to flowery Florida.
However, a viewer from the sahti area of Southern Häme does not accept the name “tequila-sahti” used by the Jewish-Porvoo-based Katz translator couple.
In the stages of the story, the men encounter natives, cannibals, children of nature who are happy to live. Johan of Padua is a different kind of European “discoverer” in the sense that he wants to get to know the natives, learns their language and does not consider the civilisation of them through Christianity as a starting point. This later leads to the Spanish occupiers condemning Johan to execution as a heretic traitor. The natives do not allow it, but release their friends.
Told by two actors, the story progresses breathtakingly. In turn, one of them becomes a monologue-like narrator and the other plays the event and the other side of the story.
The bean stew of replication, the finely controlled movement language of the body, the physical acting, the rapid changes in moods from the furiously roaring ocean storm to the sweet peace of paradise islands hit the spot. And neither actor even seems out of breath.
The flip side of the history of conquest
Niko Saarela and Sami Uotila are a well-coordinated and balanced couple as actors. The direction rhythms the performance with skilful emphases and also mercies the viewer in the downfalls.
For example, Niko Saarela’s enormous speed freezes completely when the narrator falls asleep in the story.
For a minute, everything is still and silent, until you continue forward with the line: “I don’t even know how long I slept there.”
The colour of Uotila’s voice is slightly monotonous for such a large number of fireworks: the tall tenor is reminiscent of a fantasy fairy tale in the theatre – which Fon America is, however, to some extent.
For a long time, the history of the expeditions was described in a Eurocentric way as the introduction of civilization – and the salvation message of Christianity – among the primitive population. The thousand-year-old cultures of the Arabs, China, Asia and the southern islands were subordinated to a new conception of civilisation.
Nowadays, this imperialism is also seen as the destruction of one’s own developed cultures, and people dare to acknowledge the significance of the acupuncture of natural riches for these voyages of discovery.
It is precisely this aspect of history that comes out very bluntly in Fo’s story of the explorer. Johan of Podova is followed for a few decades, close to the mid-1500s. The friends, who have grown old into long-haired greyheads, philosophize about their experiences.
During the final eclipse, the play culminates in an arrow whistling in the dark and a hit. At that time, the game had not yet been completed. Maybe it still is.