Review: Ape army
Theatre review: Ape Army Okko Leo’s new comedy tears open the view into the fast-paced and unpredictable world of investing
Okko Leo’s new comedy makes fun of investment capitalism.
Okko Leo’s plays have previously been performed extensively both in Finland and abroad. His latest play, Ape Army, is inspired by real events. In 2021, the website Reddit started a chain of events that hit the international stock market when small investors grouped together in discussion circles began to aggressively buy underpriced shares of the game company GameStop, which had seen its best days.
The phenomenon spread all over social media, which further strengthened the movement. The systematic activities of the fragmented group exploded the value of the listed company’s share skyrocketed, thus playing against investors and large hedge funds. At the same time, a name was born for the phenomenon, meme investing.
The end result of the manipulation of the “ape army” system by empowered investors on social media was that the parties that usually made the biggest profit in the financial markets lost. The underdogs won and the world changed, at least momentarily.
LEO’S PLAY is built on this classic setting, where the weaker party unexpectedly gets the upper hand. Ape Army is like a story about David and Goliath, but with memes and the jargon of investing and invested in the stock market of this decade.
Under Tuomas Rinta-Panttila’s direction, there is free space on the stage and several simultaneous activities, which works together with a rich and caricature-like cavalcade of characters. Vappu Nalbantoglu has a number of supporting characters, of which the grandmother is especially great. Pekka Huotari is an earthworm resembling Elon Musk who is frantically trying to get into space.
In Vilma Mattila’s set design, the stage has been transformed into a large green screen, which reaches captivating proportions in Joonas Tikkanen’s video design. The monitors hanging from the ceiling, reminiscent of the Wall Street stock exchange, are fed a stream of various online memes, which play an essential role in the course of the story. Mattila’s costume design combines the ultra-stylish Matrix movie with colourful millenium fashion. The soundscape dreamed up by Eliel Tammiharjupumps electronically.
IMPORTING AND Riipinen are charismatic protagonists, but the investment slang crammed with a mixture of English and Finnish makes them distantly one-dimensional. Especially Riipinen’s expression often turns into shouting.
In these moments, the gaze is drawn to the back corner of the stage, where Irmeli (Leenamari Unho), who has a memory disorder, is busy at the cottage table of her home. Irmeli plays monopoly, loses her balls of yarn, soon gets tangled up in her own sheet and has a seizure. Unho’s skillful, almost completely mime work often manages to steal attention from the front stage. The performance is punctuated by Irmeli’s nightly online calls to the creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto (Sari Haapamäki), whose business advice helps Irmeli’s personality grow to unpredictable proportions.
Ape Army is a self-conscious, cheeky performance with a lot of references to popular culture in its stage events. The audience is winked at every now and then. At its best, the performance succeeds in capturing something real about the mania of economic life and its problematic structures.
To understand the play’s dialogue, which is full of economic jargon, you need the vocabulary found in the script, which is unfortunately necessary, because otherwise you would quickly fall off this bullet train. On the other hand, I don’t know if this would dilute the viewing experience. The stage is so full of excessive, carnivalesque energy that the feeling of the absurdity of our economic system would probably only be stronger without explanations.