Review: Myyrä
GREATER THAN ITS MISSION AND ITS FATHERLAND
A brilliant dramatisation of Jari Tervo’s novel
The most striking thing about Helsinki City Theatre’s Mole is the dramaturgical strength and inventive staging of the three-hour spectacle.
Jari Tervo’s monumental novel is more or less hopeless to adapt, but Sami Keski-Vähälä has miraculously managed to overcome the challenges of the source text. And the stage version of Mole is not even a best-of compilation of the original novel, but an independent work of art that also pays tribute to Tervo with its existence.
Dramaturg Keski-Vähälä and director Milko Lehto build an entire recent historical reality on the small stage of the City Theatre, progressing from the ramparts of Hamina in 1918 to the fictional death of President Kekkonen . Occasionally, they visit a Soviet rifle factory and the Kremlin, but the clever use of the small space and simple sets avoids the feeling of packing too much material into too narrow a framework.
The performance is based on the elderly president’s future memoirs and the recurring nightmares that he wakes up to in the nocturnal Tamminiemi area.
Memories of a young man leading an execution squad and interrogating the Punik chief in the chambers of the Central Police are repeated in the illusions. The old old president also recalls the prospects of Stalin’s funeral, humiliating YYA negotiations and Soviet generals’ attempts to subject Finland to joint military exercises with its eastern neighbour.
At times, two Kekkonens of different ages are seen on stage, and the solution does not give the impression of a history lecture at all. Rather, the character deepens, the character becomes flesh.
MYTH AND METAPHOR
On a more personal level, the president is tormented by the fate of a Finnish girl who defected to the Soviet Union, as well as the father’s concern for his reckless child in the grove, whose drunken mischief also sets up an entertaining detective plot in Mole .
Or personal and personal. The president, who is serving his fifth term, conjures up in his office in Tamminiemi how his own affairs and those of the country have become mixed over the past six decades. Urho Kekkonen no longer exists, and that’s why Jari Tervo’s text doesn’t talk about Kekkonen, just the president.
Mole Kekkonen is a symbol and a metaphor. After all, Finland is fishing and going to the sauna and sipping vodka hooks with its eastern guests – a man named Kekkonen is just some kind of fog curtain thrown over Finland, in which the fate of the nation can be cleverly personified.
And yet the play tries to shed light on the individual’s life story and tell how one man became bigger than himself, his mission and his fatherland. Myyrä also succeeds in this.
The personal suffering of the young Kekkonen (Hannes Suominen) as the finisher of the execution squad’s atrocities is clearly outlined in a couple of strokes. The human horror of a middle-aged president (Matti Olavi Rani) in Moscow as a witness to the whims of the wall-crazy Stalin (Pertti Koivula) cuts the heart and mind. And the disappointment in life of the old man president (Antti Litja), the ever-deepening states of confusion and the longing for the late spouse Sylvi inevitably hurt the viewer of Mole as well.
THERAPEUTIC EFFECT OF CARICATURE
Antti Litja’s aged Kekkonen dominated the text of the play and, to some extent, the performance. Litja’s interpretation is a beautiful mixture of determination, masculine bravado and tragic fragility. Kekkonen, who is stumbling in his last days, will not be made into a number, but let’s tell the truth with a few strokes.
Litja’s Kekkonen almost overshadows Mole’s other fine characters and their sometimes masterful interpretations. Only Pertti Koivula’s furious performance as the power-filled and apparently mentally ill Stalin in the negotiations in the Kremlin takes space away from Kekkonen. Koivula’s Stalin is particularly explosive at the funeral of the despot, which the hero of the day arrives from behind the grave to celebrate in Kekkonen’s nightmare photos.
In terms of Mole’s narrative, the key character is Supo detective Jura Karhu (Rauno Ahonen), who sneaks into the president’s inner circle to find out if he is a Soviet spy after all, a mole. The character of the bear wobbles excitingly halfway between doubt and courtship, in a very human way, without knowing how to choose his side.
Brezhnev and the other Soviet viscos, as well as the homely Väyrynen , are made into pure clowning by the City Theatre’s Mole . The snappy caricatures reach their climax when a row of living dead members of the Politburo are literally carted onto the stage, who, sucking vitality from a vodka dropper bottle, churn out meaningless chatter about friendship and eternal peace.
Those scenes have a significant therapeutic effect on all those who lived through the 1970s and those who were subjected to the collective brainwashing attempt of Soviet propaganda.