Review: Poika ja Tähti

Feel free to follow your star
Once upon a time, there was a starry night when two children were born to the circus: a boy and a female foal. There was friendship, cold hearts, the pain of separation, loyalty and the courage to return to a friend from across the great sea. There was hope, a little bit of fear, gleaming eyes in the dark, and a little more nice excitement and willingness to help. There was humor and a happy ending. And there was the writer, Barbro Lindgren, who wrote down the events, and the Swedish theatre director, director and writer Peter Engkvist, who directed the story to the stage.
All these ingredients resulted in a charming play for children at the City Theatre: The Boy and the Star.

Reetta Honkakoski and Sami Uotila transform into many different roles during the play: for example, a circus director, a raven, a baby hare, a whale, a wolf and a sword swallower. Role changes are quick and require a certain sense of abstraction from the child viewer: one can be in several roles and look the same on the outside. Only movements, sounds and facial expressions change. Honkakoski’s and Uotila’s storytelling is very corporeal, and rightly so. How else would you believe that a horse jumps on a boy’s back or that a baby rabbit over one and a half meters tall is completely helpless?
The premiere audience commented briskly on the performance and giggled at the rituals of putting the baby rabbit that had lost its mother to sleep. I guess it hit close to my own experiences?

Katariina Kirjavainen’s set design is simple: a beautiful starry sky, a miniature circus rising from inside the pose, and a number of objects needed for the narrative. There is a lot of room for imagination, as The Boy and the Star is first and foremost a fairy tale.
The foyer of a small stage works well as a real theater, especially if the little spectators dare to sit alone in the front seat or on the mattresses in the front row. The performance for children over the age of four is immediate and very intimate in this space.
The music of the play is Ulf Eriksson’s: beautiful and swinging.
Marja Kuparinen
Caption:
Sami Uotila is a whale spraying water, and he takes the horse Tähti (Reetta Honkakoski) across the sea in his mouth.


Photo: Maisa Mäki