Review: Ape army

Ape army – the world conquest of meme investing

Okko Leo’s theatrical plays as performances before yesterday I had only encountered a few, even those too long ago. All of them were works ahead of their time in terms of writing: Puuvillakuosi 2013 at the Workers’ Stage Days, Evergreen Orchestra 2016 at the Lahti City Theatre and The Dark Room at the National Theatre in 2017.  Without exception, all of them turned out to be analyses of the internal order and tension of their community themes, but as theatrical interpretations, they were too old-fashioned to tell the essence of things in a psychological acting way. Okko Leo was already ahead of his time at that time – so where would he have found contemporary viewers for the lyrics on the level of Leo?

For Okko Leo’s new play, Ape Army , I tried to get acquainted with contemporary research, generational thinking indicated in letters. I superficially found out what millennia is and also what kind of payment method is virtual currency.

I myself am the child of the baby boomers born after the war. We were already growing up in a completely different world than my parents. My own children, on the other hand, were born between 1960 and 1980 and made such different choices that the field of social research began to use its own capital letter X (generation) for the entire generation.

Millennial is a term that describes a narrowly limited generation born between 1981 and 1996. The word millennial is explained by the turn of the millennium, when most of the members of the generation reached adolescence – the young Y (generation) of the new millennium.

– Millennials are the first generation of the internet. In the first wave, they also introduced social media, which has a great impact on shaping the experiences of the generation. The Internet and social media irrevocably changed the routes of information transmission away from traditional newspapers and the entire nation’s television. The change in parenting and schools is one of the factors that supported the strengthening of individualism. Millennials live in every municipality in Finland, with the focus on our country’s population centres. Regional differences are growing all the time. The impact of the coronavirus was not enough to turn the tide. More and more millennials are planning their lives abroad. Millennials are an urban generation that will give birth to an even more urban, but narrower, new generation.

– A large proportion of millennials live as singles. Everywhere in the Western world, including Finland, the millennial generation postpones starting a family until later. Finland has woken up to a deep dip in the birth rate in recent years. It is specifically related to millennials, who are now in turn of the age of families with children, but have clearly fewer children than previous generations. The issue of children is postponed to a later age to make way for studies and working life, and voluntary childlessness is much more common than in previous generations. One exception in the number of children is related to millennials with an immigrant background, among whom the number of children is clearly higher on average

“The Greens and the Left Alliance are clearly the most popular parties among millennials in Finland, and they are also the most popular parties among millennials elsewhere in Europe. One fifth of millennials, both here and elsewhere in Europe, support and partly vote for the Finns Party and other right-wing populist parties.

Virtual currencies are digital carriers of value that are not issued or guaranteed by a central bank or public authority, that are not necessarily linked to a currency established as legal tender and that do not have the same legal status as currency or money, but that are accepted as a medium of exchange by natural or legal persons and that can be transferred, stored and sold electronically. Such currency can also be called mene shares. For example, the shares of Tupperware, a manufacturer of plastic products, have ended up among meme stocks. The share price of Tupperware, which had suffered from financial difficulties, first fell by more than 80 percent from the beginning of 2023, until the company’s share price started to rise sharply with the help of meme investors, rising by almost 570 percent in the period from mid-June to early August 2023.

With this rudimentary advance knowledge, I thought I would be able to enjoy the satirical new-generation fun of Okko Leo on the modern studio stage of the Helsinki City Theatre in Pasila on 27.9.2023 with three hundred other spectators.

Tuomas Rinta-Panttila was the solution to direct APE ARMY now in 2023 to be unreal, light, farcical enough so that you can both go crazy and get bored with it, you don’t even have to comprehend it, understand it, let alone chew on it every second. You can enjoy exactly the part you want – with your great understanding or feeling yourself a lot stupid and incompetent. Such a work is light-hearted, irrational, sketchy, entertaining in its expression, modern in its technical visionary essence and, appropriately, an educational amusement related to the world of money – and it was to a large extent, at least in the Helsinki City Theatre’s wildly tearing interpretation for me.

I fell in love with the theatre form in a way that I had never experienced before. However, I was a little bothered by the constant restlessness of the lighting technology (just after I had my ears cleaned and laser surgery to make my vision glasses-free), noisy, lightning-fast changing, flashes. The idea of the creators of the show was probably to take the viewer to identify with things like on their sofa, just like the familiarity of the nightly TV picture. I didn’t expect a controlled and logical, stylish display visualization.

The definitely excessive amount of the word as a binder in Okko Leo’s stage language felt very much like a teenager’s use of language, and it is amusing only once in the performance when a grandmother deliberately tries it in her speech in order to rejuvenate herself to the level of her posterity. On the other hand, Leo’s text itself, with a huge number of scenes, with their skilful structures, provides a cleverly wordy, strong basis for the dialogue that mocks the whole performance.

The role of the capitalist trio representing big business in the play is to carefully honour the bank’s spirit and absoluteness, which brings certain profits. Vuokko Hovatta, Jari Pehkonen and Jouko Klemettilä create this trio in an interestingly colourful, confident and deceptively convincing way as a reference level that covers the entire play.

In Ape Army, the life dreams of two unemployed young people, Janica and Otto, live in the moment. After buying meme stocks, they suddenly realize that they have messed up the entire global economy. Now, their goal has changed in an instant to travel by rocket to the moon and from there to Mars. Anna-Sofia Tuominen’s freshly hopeful Janica and Olli Riipinen’s youthful dreamy conqueror of the heart and world soon no longer believe in the power of anything other than money. Old feelings of closeness to humanity, such as falling in love, trust and openness, are touchingly withering away in them. Temporary financial success instantly turns people into gamblers, beasts to each other – and in the insidious snares of success, their ultimately irritating and quarrelsome coexistence also brings depth to the whole performance, a reality that disappears in smoke from human dreams, the stock market world and stock buying.

However, my own highlight was definitely all the lewdness and the amount of imaginative overflowing stage imagery after the amount of turnover disappeared for a moment, when the DJ monkey immediately after the intermission interpreted a handsome monologue about the money being sucked up by banks, especially investment banks, in 2008 for himself. An instructive speech, a reminder, a cry for help in its calmness, made seriously and skillfully about them, was one necessary speech for all of us viewers who had already had enough amusement in the first half and thought about the content of the matter. It is this kind of seriousness that is needed in an amusement play, with such a contrast the power of the message rises to the heights of drama. The genuine, only applause for the performance was deserved by Mikko Virtanen and the scriptwriter and director.

Another insightful way is to theatrically show the many factors and faces of the movement of money and meme stock trading in the world – from the depths of the soul of a single actor’s personality by mastering e.g. a great ape, a white-clad nurse, a Turkish social media celebrity, a butcher, a research director of current meme capitalism, a rabbit, a bank clerk, a grandmother –Vappu Nalbantoglun incredibly confusing perfect sketches of characterization sketches. As a result of similar imitation, memes can change like genes as they are passed from one person to another and from one generation to another, from one profession to another.

It felt like Finnish theatre had discovered new, contemporary critique of the economy and horrible humour, in which enrichment and power are in a completely surprising form to change, surprise, awaken us and our lives in the makings of our future. With mere means that seem like jokes and imitations, we can fight an equal battle against a faceless economic system – I summed up the balance of the proposal.