Review: De rättfärdiga

Terror as an intellectual puzzle

With Albert Camus’s play The Righteous Searchlight , the Little Theatre plays on the essence and causes of terror in a story based on real events about five Russian socialists, who assassinated Grand Duke Sergei Romanov in Moscow in 1905 in the name of the revolution.
Terror has been used, is used and will be used as long as there are people who, in the name of “righteousness”, are prepared to fight for a greater cause by opting out of themselves. On the surface, The Righteous is about what happens before, during and after the attack. On a deeper level, the focus is on the contemplations, thoughts and ideological mouths of those involved about the justification of murdering another human being. In this sense, the performance has more of the character of terror as an intellectual puzzle than an action thriller.

Stable grip

Director Aleksis Meaney already shined in Teater 90°’s play Aniara last year and once again shows that he has a stable grip on the performance.
Set designer Alisha Davidov has made a functioning large rectangular stage image with small black pedestals for the actors to stand on. In combination with Kalle Paasonen’s light and video projections in the background and on the walls, an illusion is created that in the first act centres on the intense brainstorming of the closed room. In the second act, the mood and tone change radically when the assassin (Sampo Sarkola), who killed the Grand Duke by throwing a bomb at him, is imprisoned in an orange T-shirt in an otherwise Guantanamo-like detention center and subjected to “stylized torture”. The change to 21st century clothes with camouflage suits and boots also shows a jump a hundred years into the future.

Missed information

Unfortunately, the otherwise content-rich programme does not contain a word about Albert Camus’s life, thoughts and production, which might have made the play more easily understandable.
The Frenchman Albert Camus (1913-1960), who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car accident three years later, was an intellectual left-winger and a member of the Communist Party from 1937 to 1939.
But he was not a one-eyed fanatic, but harshly criticized the Soviet dictatorship as early as the 1950s. Camus’s attitude towards terrorism and violence was also negative, making The Righteous a plausible story about people who, despite courage, devotion and noble thoughts, move towards the brink of tragedy, simply because the goodness they consider themselves to represent is also evil.

Strength and weakness

The Righteous is an intellectual play, which is excellent at a time when more populist entertainment is more the rule than the exception in our Finland-Swedish institutional theatres in the capital
But while that is the strength of the play, it is also to some extent its weakness. In plain language, this means many well-delivered, memorable lines and an insight that nothing is black and white. But it also means that the philosophical hair-splitting sometimes makes the play slip out of focus and the tempo stops.
Who is then a terrorist, who is a national hero? It depends on the perspective, which Teater Mesola’s play Eugen Schauman in 2009 was a good proof of.
Lillan’s actors are all on the bite: Pekka Strang as the terrorist group’s anguished primus engine Annenkov and police chief Skuratov; Sampo Sarkola as the doubting idealist Kaliaev; theatre academy student Peter Ahlqvist as a bloody terrorist henchman and prison guard; Peter Kanerva as the passionate and hot-tempered Feodorov and Nina Hukkinen as the bomb maker Dora and Grand Duchess. Peter Kanerva, who with his terrorist role and as the popular comic prison cleaner Foka, once again shows one hundred percent stage empathy requires an extra mention.