Review: Toveri K
The Helsinki City Theatre’s Comrade K is not a matter of reason in the audience, but of feelings. In the theatre directed by Russian Roman Viktyuk , no sound or sweat is spared. Joseph Stalin used to call writers engineers of the human mind. Viktyuk takes the viewer to the gym of the human mind.
Comrade K is like an opera where the choir parts are performed by the male choir Huutajat and the arias are performed by Vappu Nalbantoglu with an amazing alto soprano. The action on stage is merciless. (And what muscles!)
Vladimir Anosov’s choreography would also be well suited to the opera stages. The performance is based on a wild physical presence. At least the viewer of the performance is already on lactic acid at the beginning of this two-and-a-half-hour one-act marathon.
It is now the beginning of January. Still, I feel like claiming that the City Theatre’s Comrade K is the theatre event of the year. Comrade K is a play that a serious theatre enthusiast should not miss under any circumstances.
Comrade K is an assault that takes the viewer away. However, after the initial shock, it also kicks the thoughts into motion. The performance’s glorious aftertaste comes from the fact that every detail of it is obviously extremely carefully thought out. And I’m sure that this aftertaste will linger somewhere in the back of my brain for a long time.
Playwright Edvard Radzinski , who has a strong reputation in Russia, has written a play about Otto Wille Kuusinen specifically for the Helsinki City Theatre. On Thursday, the premiere of the play was seen on the main stage of the City Theatre.
Kuusinen, who rebelled on the side of the Reds, fled to the Soviet Union after the Civil War and eventually rose to the highest leadership of the country. He loyally served Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror until the death of the bloody dictator.
The theme of the play has a lot in common with the Finnish National Theatre’s play When the Doves Disappeared, based on Sofi Oksanen’s book.
However, Kuusinen was not just Edgar Moes betraying all his ideals in desperate circumstances, but something even worse. Stalin’s and Adolf Hitler’s reigns of terror would not have survived for long without talented and capable officials like Kuusinen.
Kuusinen was basically a humanist and a cultural person. What made him change his skin like a snake according to Stalin’s whims and even deny his own son and wife three times, when Stalin had almost all of his colleagues and friends killed, as well as a large number of all the former Red Guards who had fled to Russia for their lives after the Civil War?
What made Kuusinen sell his soul to the devil? Mr Radzinski does not have an unambiguous answer to this question.
The fact that he survived this meat grinder already says something about Kuusinen’s intelligence and extraordinary talent. In the case of such a talented person, the sheer fear of death does not explain his behavior in any way. Kuusinen also had to have a strong belief in what he was doing.
Kuusinen’s story is familiar to anyone who has read the memoirs of the communist Arvo “Poika” Tuominen , who defected back to Finland on the eve of the war, until the outbreak of the Winter War.
What was really surprising was how close Tuominen and Radzinski, who had rummaged through the archives of the Kremlin, are to their views on the causes and consequences of the events of that time.
The conclusions are also the same. The Finns would have shared the fate of the Chechens if the Soviet Union had succeeded in occupying the country. The entire stubborn and tenacious people would have been deported to forced labor camps in Siberia.
Rdazinski’s view of us Finns who are currently wallowing in our own misery is flattering. Perhaps the most controversial part is director Viktyuk’s decision to portray Mannerheim (Markus Saari) as a young and bright-eyed hero who races onto the stage on a blue women’s bike.
There is at least one obvious justification for this decision, too. In this battle of wills, Mannerheim represents a young, newly independent republic that is challenged by the greatest and cruelest “tsar” of all time in an empire that has lasted for more than 300 years.
Vladimir Boer’s production is ingenious. As the name suggests, the main stage of the Helsinki City Theatre is large, but in principle, Boer makes it look unsunny. An old joke about the tallest building in Leningrad comes to mind. From there, there was a view all the way to Siberia.
Can the limitlessness and desolation of the reign of terror be described more effectively?
The gym equipment on stage is certainly good enough to symbolize the ways in which Stalin turned a semi-feudal Russia, which was based on serfdom, into an industrial country where, at least according to statistics, production grew at a world-record rate. Everyone who trains in a serious sense at the gym knows, at least in principle, what Stakhanovite self-discipline and heroism at work are like.
The toughest detail in the set design seamlessly connects the play to the present day. There are two large busts on the stage. One plays Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili , who shows his tongue to the viewers, and the other obviously plays Vladimir Putin. The Tsar is dead, long live the Tsar!
The meanings and roots of Anosov’s choreography do not have to be sought far. The step patterns are like straight out of a changing of the guard ritual that apparently still repeats at certain hours in Lenin’s mausoleum.
The role of Kuusinen is played by the director of the Helsinki City Theatre, Asko Sarkola, and why not. Since 1997, Sarkola has also had to serve a despotic ruler who, at least here in Lappeenranta, places artistically ambitious theatre makers in spiritual Siberia over and over again.
At the premiere, I seemed to notice some kind of insecurity in Sarkola’s approaches.
Esko Roine played Stalin, who was already dying, with a sovereign touch.
The young generation of Sampo Sarkola, Valtteri Tuominen, Tommi Rantamäki, Miika Alatupa, Raine Heiskanen, Juha Jokela, Sami Paasila, Ville Sormunen, Aleksi Seppänen and Sami Uotila have trained themselves to be in top shape for the play. I’ve probably spent a lot of time at the gym.
The same physical strength is also represented by Vappu Nalbantoglu in the role of Kuusinen’s second wife, Aino Kuusinen . Nalbantoglu is the spirit of communism on stage, the primus motor that keeps the story going.
I was sure that Nalbantoglu has a background in dancer before I checked it.
Toiling is rewarding at least for the viewer of the performance. Although Viktyuk’s direction is actually based on an extraordinary number of repetitions on the same theme, from the viewer’s point of view, the performance works like a tough gym workout, feeling more and more euphoric with repetition after repetition.
The expression comes from muscle memory. In Finland, the concept of theatre represented by Jouko Turkka has been ridiculed and doubted from one decade to the next. In Russia, the big names in theatre obviously believe in the blissful effect of toil. Theatre is a genre where doing your best and seeing what it is enough for is not enough for anything.
Comrade K is a play that everyone must experience for themselves. The historical baggage of the play is a little lighter to carry if you acquire a script. The programme includes a short description of all the people whose names come up on stage.
Aino Kuusinen was a passionate woman of ideology who was rewarded with a 15-year sentence in a labor camp for her sacrifices. The couple’s relationship becomes the leading theme of the play, of course, for dramaturgical reasons.
The number of victims of Stalin’s reign of terror is counted in the millions. According to some estimates, as many as 20 million people died in executions, slave labour, inhumane conditions in prison camps and famines caused by forced collectivisation.
These are figures that we cannot possibly understand.
On an individual level, it is easy to perceive the contradiction between the equality speeches and actions of the communists represented by Kuusinen. Kuusinen was one of the founders and leaders of the Third International Comintern and its successor, the Cominform, which promoted world revolution.
From the point of view of women, such a communist world revolution would surely have been as blessed as the world rule of extremist Muslims is now.