Review: Oscar ja Mamma Roosa

Oskari Olevainen faces big questions

If you want to live for a moment at the crossroads of sad-ridden reality, fantasy and belief in God loaded with question marks, you should head to the “backyard” of the Helsinki City Theatre, Studio Elsa. The French writer Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt , who has successfully made a splash in the European theatre scene for the past ten years, circumvents precisely that intersection in his new play, and does not just go around but penetrates to the core. There, in the midst of sorrow, you will find solace. That is the most important thing that a text that deals with death more or less seriously achieves.

Oscar and Mamma Roosa, directed by Eija-Elina Bergholm, evokes a wide range of emotions on stage and in the audience. The last days of the ten-year-old Oscar, who has cancer but is relentlessly curious about life’s small and big secrets, have many things winding side by side. The little boy would like answers to important questions such as “Why me?” “What is left unlived?” What lies ahead?” So many difficult things, so little time to solve them.

Fortunately, Oskari has Mamma Roosa at the children’s hospital, who understands his concerns. He acts as an intermediary and leads Oscar to inquire about these things by letter directly from God, whose omnipotence or existence in general the young man is deeply skeptical. Mamma Roosa also acts as a buffer in Oskari’s collisions with the wall built by the doctors to protect him: a child’s terminal illness is something about which you cannot tell the child anything comprehensible. The hospital’s nursing aunt, who has a great understanding and fluent reading of the emotions of a small person, also knows her role in arranging the relationships between child patients in the background.

In a word, Mamma Roosa is everything to Oscar as the moment of giving up approaches. You can’t imagine a better hospice nurse than her.

Heart
heart rate

The City Theatre’s play has appropriately many different tunes. At times, Oscar’s fears of death and loneliness grip the viewer deeply, while at other moments, you can wholeheartedly rejoice in the unabashed liveliness and crooked humor of the child patients.

An essential plot to the play is brought by Oscar’s fantasy, but still realistic fast-forward of the life recorder made possible for him by Mamma Roosa. In it, the later stages of Oscar go like ten years per day until a hundred and twenty, so if Oscar’s real life is short, the lifeless will pass even faster. The viewer, who relates these visions to their own life cycle, can only wonder whether a person really has to forcibly walk through life along a marked path.

Director Bergholm allows the story to jump on its levels quite freely, but in a way that its common thread does not break or disappear out of reach. The presence of the otherworldly and the heavenly unknown is concretized in Kimmo Karjunen’s sometimes startling, albeit rather repetitive projections towards the end, in which the dancer Jyrki Karttunen has no choreographic shackles at all when hovering, for example, like an angel in the air.

The rest of the visualization then remains much more meaningless, one could even say meaningless.
However, what the play ultimately leaves behind is largely in the hands of its performer – Oscar, Mamma Roosa and, at times, the rest of the hospital staff – Kristiina Elstelä . He does not use drastic external means in his transformations, but grows everything from within. And when there is that heart in that direction, the end result is full of it.


Thanks to Elstelä’s heartfelt performance, Oscar and Mamma Roosa is a great play for many generations to watch. For the younger viewer who is puzzled or worried about the mystery of death, Elstelä is just the kind of “mamma rose” who guides the final truth, the inevitability of the end of life, to understand and accept.