Review: Missä kuljimme kerran
A great play about individuals scarred by the Civil War in Helsinki
WHEN THE POLITICAL BECOMES PERSONAL
Based on the novel by Kjell Westö, the City Theatre’s play Where We Walked Once depicts not only Helsinki, but also the tensions of the Civil War and the fates of ordinary people as victims of these tensions, executioners and pawns. The play is dramatized and directed by Kari Heiskanen.
Westö’s Finlandia Prize-winning novel is full of characters, events and plot twists, and adapting it into a three-hour play has been a real chore. Heiskanen has succeeded well in this, and the end result is a collage-like story about a growing city and people in the whirlwind of world events.
At first, the viewer is a little disturbed by the fact that the choices of the characters in the play are not motivated enough. However, that is not the intention, but the characters and events appear as part of a larger whole than the individual, although a few scenes that remain detached from the whole have been included.
Opportunity makes a killer
Westö and Heiskanen skilfully describe the conflicts between the ethnic groups that led to the Civil War and their continuum from one decade to the next. Both the Reds and the Whites commit senseless acts of violence in the play. The opportunity makes a thief – and some people, regardless of ideology, also a bloodthirsty killer. On both sides, the tumult of the battle is also used to avenge personal grudges.
Everyone has to choose their side in the play, although this is often determined by what they were born into. The play’s pacifist and dissident Ivar Grandell (Pekka Valkeejärvi) wants to stay out of the conflagration, but the idea of peace ultimately proves to be Grandell’s fate.
The real bad boy of the play is the cold and tough Cedi Lilliehjelm (Pekka Huotari), who in court orders the mothers and elderly of fatherless children to be shot without regret for “crimes against society”.
The play’s programme booklet contains a comprehensive collection of statistics and historical facts about the terrorist acts of the Reds and Whites and the backgrounds of the events depicted in the play.
Front lines in war and love
The play’s timeline ends in the 60s, but the tensions between the parties still echo in Finnish culture. Social conflicts become visible in the relationships between individuals, the political becomes personal. The relationship between Allu (Niko Saarela), a football star who has risen from a working-class quarter, and Lucy (Vuokko Hovatta), a bourgeois girl, begins with passion, but ends with fundamental differences of opinion stemming from class conflicts.
As early as 1908, women have passed an initiative in Parliament to raise the age of marriage for women from 15 to 17 years and to change the age at which women can start their sexual life from 12 to 15 years.
Lucy, who freed herself from the shackles of a woman’s role with the help of her bourgeois background, is looking for the third sex with her friend
The bourgeois girl does not understand the misery in which people live in the working-class quarters, and she is not interested in politics or world events. However, he wants to help, which the proud Allu thinks is giving out pieces of grace. Allu thinks that the bourgeois girl knows nothing about suffering, not even though her family member has died of the Spanish flu and the rector of the house has been shot in front of the girl’s eyes.
In the working-class quarters, people suffer from tuberculosis and hunger. The civil war left 20,000 orphans, and most of them were the children of those who fought on the side of the Reds. War is a tragedy for the individual, in which there are no winners.
Since the turn of the 21st century and globalization, Western people have to feel the same helplessness in the face of poverty in the Third World as Lucy feels in the face of the suffering of workers.
And where did we go at last?
The narrative is spiced up with handsome black-and-white photos of Helsinki and its residents. Helsinki is a strongly divided city, the boundary of which is the Pitkäsilta bridge. While the bourgeoisie rattles the tram to Kulosaari, the little boys of Sörnäinen throw stones at the tram in Westö’s novel.
Young people gather in the Esplanade Park, the party continues until the morning during Prohibition, and booze is drunk straight from a bucket. Jazz and new dance styles drive young people wild, and dancers’ ostrich feathers swing in cabaret performances.
At the same time, the play is a wistful tale of the defiance and great expectations of youth, and of what happens to them under the yoke of world events and the wheels of fate. Towards the end of the play, Lucy states that life only gave her 19 hat boxes.
The circles close, the gifts of luck and misfortune are passed from father to son. Eccu Widing (Eero Aho), who despised his father Jali’s (Seppo Maijal) fascination with photographing snowy trees as a young man, ends up photographing snow and winter on the sea ice after many phases.