Review: Kummitusjuna

The new play performed on the Pasila stage of the Helsinki City Theatre is something different from what we are used to.

The musical is a genre known for glamour and great emotions. In the theatre, music rarely creates new events – it mainly accompanies them. The sad song starts playing in a sad situation instead of acting as a trigger for future events.

In The Ghost Train, written by Lauri Maijala and Sinna Virtanen, music plays an indelible central role. The play is composed throughout, which does not mean that there is singing all the time, but that the music creates emotional states in the background throughout the play. A skilled live band does a lot of work in the corner of the stage, playing a wide variety of mood pieces. The music, on the other hand, gives rise to all sorts of strange things.

The story of the ghost train draws a metro route from Mellunmäki all the way to Ruoholahti with the help of the well-known metaphor “Life is a journey”. In the play, something strange happens at every metro stop, and delightfully, even the beloved metro announcements have been included.

The viewer stays on their toes, as each stop offers a new strange and macabre scene. Black humour blossoms when a lamenting body crawls out of a chest freezer in Myllypuro and the Siilitie hedgehog family is faced with a disgustingly unrealistic tragedy. The stories of a bickering puppet couple and the tragic “miracle skier” on Hiihtäjäntie in Herttoniemi are also particularly captivating.

Often it takes a while on the theatre bench before the play starts to take off, but in The Ghost Train, this happened very quickly. A large part of the scenes in the 1 h 40 min play are also quite memorable. The most enjoyable metro travel was between Kontula and Herttoniemi. Unfortunately, soon after this, we jumped into a kind of potpourri, which is why the downtown area was largely left unexplored. After the ghost train, it’s hard to look at certain stops in the east without smiling, so it’s a shame that the same thing didn’t continue all the way to the lime lines.

In the middle of the play, I told my companion that the Ghost Train reminded me of a recent performance of Coincidences at the KOM Theatre. My friend knew right away that the same Lauri Maijala had also directed the play based on Daniil Harms’ short stories. What these two works had in common was at least their absurdity, unpredictability and episodic nature.

The only shortcoming I see in Ghost Train is the same as in Coincidences – it is almost impossible for a play consisting of detached absurd scenes to be of uniform quality. In such a whole, in addition to pearls, there are scenes that are not necessarily bad in themselves, but which inevitably pale in comparison to the previous pearls. However, this was a small problem in the fresh Ghost Train, which deservedly managed to make its audience laugh throughout the premiere.

For lovers of Helsinki, excellent music and dark humour, this is undoubtedly the most recommended play of the autumn!