Review: Nenä

WHEN THE PERFORMING ARTS SEE BEYOND ITS NOSE

The stage work of Ukrainian-born director and actor Viktor Drevitsky , who has lived in Finland for more than two decades, is startling. It’s like dancing on the edge of the grave. The actors of the Helsinki City Theatre give their voices and all their expressive power to their colleagues who have been subjected to political persecution across the eastern border. And with what kind of narrative. With comedy, escaping into play, drifting into dreams, smiling at the theatre.
The story bounces loosely, takes a sounding board from history and literature, draws links with time jumps and brightens lenses. The improvisation-like method is a good thing of luck when it comes to a theatrical performance created in prison.
But the same looseness unfortunately eats away at the full reception of the performance. It is best opened up to literature lovers, especially those who know their Gogol. However, the common thread is social criticism, which reaches every viewer.

The venue is Solovetsky Island in the White Sea. As a word, monastic walls sound more beautiful than prison walls, although both are true in Solovetsky’s case. Prisoners sent there by Imperial Russia were already sitting inside the walls in the 1800s. After the revolution, the conquered monastery began to fill with enemies of Soviet society, and a new system of punishment was born, the Gulagen archipelago, known from the works of Aleksandr Solzhenytsin . Stalin’s persecutions made the situation worse. Among the prisoners were many intellectuals, dissidents and clergymen. About half of them were killed.
The play features a character named Les Kurbas. The famous Ukrainian theatre man of the same name was indeed imprisoned in Solovetsky in 1933 and shot in 1937 along with more than a thousand other prisoners.
The other actor prisoners are fictional, but there is no shortage of role models in reality.

The prison theatre will produce a performance that will make use of Gogol’s short story The Nose. In the story, the nose of collegiate assistant Kovalev disappears one fine day. A person can be much more than without their social status!
So Kovalev is like a chip on the waves, and there is no support from the right or the left.
This nose game takes the team to different social classes, makes them servants and masters, flatterers and flatterers, lets them feel what it is like to be a handler or a horse. Recklessness, subjugation, humiliation, patterns of violence from the straitjacket method to rape are being analysed.
Character guidance is precise and takes you to another culture. The actors meet expectations well. The tempo is fast and even at the premiere it caused some repetition to become mushy. But there are also periods of stagnation, and the contrast of the narrative is particularly appealing: the prisoners get to tell their story both in the form built into the text and directly, as themselves.
There is elastic material in the cast throughout. Pekka Huotari, Jari Pehkonen and Seppo Maijala glide effortlessly from one role to another, each utilising their own personal traits, as well as Heidi Herala with her strong comic/tragic expression and Vappu Nalbantoglu with her subtle and secretive interpretation.
Slavism finds a place in both music and dance; The choreography – also expanded to include the positioning of the characters and movement on stage – follows the plot. The stage image, the prison milieu, can be seen as a symbol of the evil of the past as dark and oppressive, but it also effortlessly makes room for dizzying action, for emotions that escalate into boisterous emotions that lead to memories – or forgetfulness.

The costumes draw from the rich soil, dress the women beautifully, the puppet figures excessively, and give the nose, the councillor of state, a white robe polished with gold, like that of a high clergyman.