Review: Kielletyt laulut

Protest songs from Soviet-era prison camps


Kielletyt Laulut (Forbidden Songs ), dramatised and directed by Pirkko Saisio, is an evocative, highly engaging musical performance with theatrical elements. The performance is based on poems, compositions and commentaries that were mainly created in prison camps in the Soviet Union.

Rarely has the Helsinki City Theatre experienced such expressively vehement protest moods and ironic playfulness as now, through the relevant connections to the past, the Soviet Union and today’s Russia.

In the musical performance, which will be performed at the theatre’s Studio Elsa, Pirkko Saisio, Jonna Järnefelt and Janne Marja-aho will perform with songs, lines, dramatised elements and alternately choreographed elements. The orchestra, consisting of Jussi Tuurna, Sara Puljula and Topi Korhonen, also participates in the acting and singing.

The interaction between the orchestra and the singing actors works excellently. Depending on the content of the songs, which are about everything from longing for freedom to longing for love, the actors occasionally change character and character personality. In this way, there will also be a change of pace under Saisio’s direction. Janne Marja-aho creates breathtaking acrobatic positions and is jokingly clever in his interpretations. Both Pirkko Saisio and Jonna Järnefelt play out intensely in their interpretations.


Criticism of Stalin

These include some songs written and composed by the famous satirical poet Bulat Okudzjava (1924–1997) and the song St. Petersburg set to music by Alla Pugacheva (b. 1949) to words by the poet Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), who was sentenced to hard labour and died in a prison camp near Vladivostok. The well-known protest singer, poet and actor Vladimir Vysotsky (1938–1980) contributes two songs. In addition, Pirkko Saisio has written the lyrics to several melodies.

The moods change from ironic jokes to melancholy, melancholy, sadness, aggressiveness and resignation. Both at the beginning and at the end of the performance, reference is made to the recently murdered young Russian journalist Anastasia Baburova and the lawyer Stanislav Markelov , who worked at the same newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, as Anna Politkovskaya.

The dramaturgical tension gradually rises from a more light-hearted tone at the beginning towards dark gloom at the end. The décor, with its two car wrecks and newspaper on the stage floor and often a rather dim world of light, also contributes to the melancholy atmosphere. The irony comes through, among other things, in the red-painted star on the stage floor, against which the three performers each point their “finka”, the Finnish puukkon, also known in the Soviet Union. In these scenes, the KGB, the FSB, democracy in the Soviet Union and holy Russia are alternately celebrated.

The programme booklet is provided with translator Jukka Mallinen’s excellent informative introduction to the Soviet underworld with its motley subculture, where the forbidden, fascinating songs symbolised anarchism and long-awaited freedom.