Review: Bolla
Helsinki City Theatre’s Bolla is an extremely concise and quick summary of a book in which emotions have the greatest space in the book My Cat Yugoslavia Pajtim Statovci, a Yugoslavian-born writer, dealt with love between men.
The author’s second book, the Finlandia Prize-winning Bolla, also delves into forbidden love between men. Now it changes the family dynamics and the lives of two men irrevocably.
The play adaptation of Bolla for the Small Stage of the Helsinki City Theatre was written by Tuomas Timonen. It is an extremely concise and fast-paced view of a book in which emotions have the greatest space.
The protagonists, Arsim and Milos, are the ethnic partners in the wars of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, while at the same time being lovers. Arsim is Albanian and Milos is Serbian.
Arsim lives a double life. He has a wife. They have children, but at the same time, their love for Milos remains. Milos is a medical student. Arsim’s passions are in literature.
Milja Sarkola as a director looks closely at the emotional world of these young men. The set design – a revolving stage where you are in two homes at the same time – works excellently.
The men meet in the café and immediately recognize each other’s sensitivities and sexual orientations. The next meeting is inevitable.
This results in a deep love affair.
In the production of the play, the men’s deep affection and physical relationship are shown as if they were looking at it from a window. Choreography has been used in the lovemaking scenes. The view is beautiful and can withstand daylight.
The family grows, the feeling stays
The story itself is endlessly sad, as are the wars of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, in which 300,000 people perished.
The war in Kosovo was part of these wars of disintegration. Milos decides to go to war and his mind falters. And in the end, he is shattered by the sight of all the pain, torture, suffering, and injustice.
Arsim and his family choose to flee the country out of necessity.
The family has grown and he has no other option but to move on with his life. Jessica Grabowsky’s interpretation of Ajshe, Arsim’s husband, is endlessly loyal and honorable. She keeps the family together, accepts and covers up her husband’s relationships – even the fact that Arsim mistakenly seeks a sexual relationship with a minor.
Arsim is imprisoned, but Ajshe also hides this from his children and relatives.
The totality of war and its way of changing people, even love, are very present in the performance. There is no way to escape.
There is no way to escape love, but neither is there a way to escape how war distorts and forces a person into another.
Arsim and Milos are already other, from outside society, when the story begins in the early 1990s. They are the Bollaa themselves, which is the name of the story.
In the eyes of others, Bolla is evil, devil, devil, outsider, marked, expelled, false. And in the end, it goes into obscurity.
The Fall of Being Beautiful
As a whole, the play is a wonderful conversation between the inner dialogue, the soundscape and the people. Mikko Kauppila, an actor known from Adults, is sensitive as Milos all the time.
His whole being, and especially his face, shows how pain can make a person as sensitive as an angel and as inhuman as a broken person can be.
Samuli Niittymäki’s Arsim’s mission and fall is to be handsomely beautiful. He cannot reveal himself, and when he finally does, he is not recognized as the loving man he would like to be.
The third character is Aleksi Saura’s soundscape, which has echoes of Yugoslav folk music, but its pulse is sadly harrowing. The soundscape cuts into people’s speech and separates them from each other or reinforces what they are thinking inside.
Bright focus
Milja Sarkola has succeeded in condensing the viewer’s point of view so that they do not have to think about what is important in any scene. The focus is clear. Conversations in extremely difficult and embarrassing situations get on your skin and stay in your mind for a long time.
Just as we want to be right, decent and respectable, we also want to be broken. Miserable, broken, betrayed and empty – that’s what this performance shows.
In the supporting roles, Jouko Klemettilä and Ursula Salo are older; doctor, landlord, policeman, teacher, principal, prison guard.
They all have an important place in the lives of the main characters. They are not presented in an exaggerated way, and they act sensibly and well in their own way.
Otto Rokka, as a young boy longing for love, wants to feel, at least for a moment, that he is a shiny image that is missed. The end result is a disaster.
I haven’t read Statovci’s book, which is why I was able to grasp the theatrical execution of the work quickly. The task of theatre is not to repeat what is written in the novel. In this form, Bolla works excellently on stage.
Bolla’s performances are sold out in the autumn. As the restrictions on the number of spectators are eased, more seats will be available for performances.