Review: Omaksi kuvakseen

I am the world


Tuija Töyräs has written and directed a play for the City Theatre about the youth of the poet Pentti Saarikoski . The collage-like fiction takes place in 1962. At the time, the 25-year-old Saarikoski was in the Kupittaa mental hospital. Drunkenness and identity conflicts had put the young man in poor shape.
In its own image, the play has an airy structure and in places is very beautiful. There would have been plenty of events in Saarikoski’s youth that could have emphasized his role as a clown. Tuija Töyräs gives only a few joyful scenes to show what kind of a master Saarikoski was when he wanted to.
Oskari Katajisto, who plays the poet, has a wide scale: from drunken madness to ecstasy, from longing for God to denying faith, from spirituality to carnality. It is easy to believe in the charm of his poet and at the same time see himself as a lost and socially timid young man. A person is really a whole world.
In its flashback, the play takes us to the conflicts of the cramped bourgeois home, the school and the parish. His youthful love for his first wife (Sanna Saarijärvi) is strong. At first, the girlfriend (Susa Saukko) seems very delicate and fragile, but the passion that holds the couple together comes out skillfully in the climbing rope scene together. The search for sexual identity has been carried out in style in the play in other ways as well.
Unfortunately, gone are the important friends from school and philosophical discussions about the state of Western culture and the church, as well as the place of one’s own self in the world. The origin and reasons for Saarikoski’s political interest also remain a detached glimpse.

Markus Fagerudd’s music sounds beautiful and clear, especially the passages from the New Testament sung in Greek. Tina Jokitalo’s successful set design transforms into many things and, with its light reflections and shadow figures, emphasizes the airy structure of the entire play and the rapid changes of time and place. Saarikoski’s poems invite people to return to his poetry books and biographies.