Review: Luonnon laki
The law of nature
Kari Hotakainen’s novel The Law of Nature (Siltala 2013) premiered as a play version on the Pengerkatu stage of the Helsinki City Theatre on Wednesday 27 January. I was there too, thank you for the invitation to the theatre!
The Law of Nature is the first play I’ve seen that takes place almost entirely in a hospital setting, and the main actor plays his role mostly in a hospital bed. These exceptional elements alone kept the interest going, but the play itself did its job just as well.
Geothermal heating entrepreneur Rautala (Pertti Sveholm) is involved in a car accident and is badly injured. The direction is to the hospital’s rehabilitation ward, where we are faced with fellow patients who have experienced many kinds of fates, tired nurses, a leaking roof and crumbling walls. The accident scene is great and distressing, you want to close your eyes and then you don’t.
Rautala has successfully avoided taxes practically all his adult life, and now that society really has something to give him, he starts paying the bills. Tells and toys may have been ignored by him and his business partner (Iikka Forss), so to speak, and the return to “reality” is raw and concrete.
At the same time, you should rehabilitate more or less to the way you used to. In the hospital bed next to him lies Badu (Matti Leino), who is recovering from a knife tickle, and who has his own baggage to carry. From time to time, Laura (Ursula Salo), a nurse who works in shifts, goes to the cleaning closet to listen to Megadeth in order to cope with the next angry words and endless night shifts. And in the background, there is always only the Cutter (Matti Olavi Ranin), who snatches one slice here and another there: the common cake must be balanced.
Rautala is also crossed with her daughter Mira (Sanna-June Hyde), who is in the last stages of her pregnancy. In many ways, Mira is the opposite of her father, and the meetings and contacts between father and daughter invariably end in arguments. There is a limited amount of understanding for the other, even though there is no lack of love.
The play forms a complex whole in which the public and the private, the common and the personal are intertwined as human relationships, economic facts, social injustices and personal views.
The Law of Nature is a sharply funny and sometimes sad play. The humour is black and crooked, and the more tragic details do not need to be particularly underlined to the viewer, they emerge with their own weight. The story has a lot to tell, which goes a little against the whole: the viewer may not be able to decide what to focus on the most. There are many characters, some of them just glimpse on stage, and you can’t really grasp all the bits of the story.
What is the law of nature then? Does it mean that the strong survive and the weak don’t? Or that the old ones have to give space so that the new ones can fit in? Is it a law of nature that everything must be cut? Or the fact that the quiet ones are left behind without a defender?
There are plenty of cuts, but I am left with a glimmer of hope from the play. Humans decide for themselves, and society is made up of people, not machines or systems. We can choose where the money is invested, we can decide how the care is distributed. If we want to.
Kari Hotakainen: The Law of Nature on the Pengerkatu stage of the Helsinki City Theatre