Review: Morfars mauser
Despite a few clichés and too many threads, Marcus Rosenlund’s Grandfather’s Mauser is a gripping, brutally realistic play about bullying.
The opening scene in Marcus Rosenlund’s play Grandpa’s Mauser echoes wonderfully familiar. Tobias Zilliacus plays a Finland-Swedish radio editor who has achieved the status of a mini-celebrity, which you can get when the Swedish branch of the state-owned media company regularly lets your voice be heard on the air. (Whether Rolle has a permanent job or has to make do with part-time employment, as they interviewed in a recent report in the trade magazine Journalisten, is not clear in the play.) Just before an important broadcast, he gets a conversation that embarrassingly throws him off balance, makes him lose his concepts and forces him to confront a repressed past.
If you recognize the basic elements of this opening scene, it is because it is so reminiscent of a scene in Kaj Korkea-aho’s novel The Grass Is Darker on the Other Side that you wonder if it is a deliberate homage to another author, who also has a background as a popular presenter at Yle and who is also not afraid to dig where he stands and use wounds. personal experiences to build a gripping story.
Class-based bullying
But where Korkeaaho in his novel moved with one foot on the borderlands of the supernatural, Rosenlund’s story, directed by Michaela Granit, is brutally grounded in reality. The Ostrobothnian soil and toxic male ideals, the consequences of which Korkeaaho scrutinized, are replaced on the stage of the Lilla Teatern by the icy class contempt of the Kauniainen elite. The young Rolle grows up surrounded by a new generation that represents old money, and they are not afraid to show it to the “proleRolle”, who comes from a more humble background, by literally in his boots.
The credibility of the dialogue is one of the play’s strongest cards. The roaring, nasal vowels produced by Rolle’s teenage tormentors (Markus Riuttu, Pia Runnakko and Joachim Wigelius) make me squirm with irritation but also with embarrassing recognition. This is a jargon that I myself definitely participated in before my brain was fully developed, albeit not drawn to a completely sadistic one-sided point.
The repeated scenes that hammer in both how deeply and deeply a child’s mind can suffer, but also what disgusting sadism it can conjure up, are reminiscent of Jonas Gardell’s A UFO Makes an Entrance, and transition from heartbreaking drama to something more reminiscent of psychological horror. An emotions rather than bodily fluid-based splatter film that is still not much more restrained than a chainsaw massacre when it comes to really pushing the viewer’s nose right into the essence of human suffering and evil.
Many balls in the air
Tobias Zilliacus owns his role from the first moment. His facial expressions combined with Jutta Kainulainen’s pale, studio-like disguise and Ville Aaltonen’s chilly lighting design reflect both the naïve vulnerability of a brutally terrorised child’s soul and the bitter but trembling cynicism of a superficially healed but psychologically traumatised nervous wreck. Just how bullying has repercussions, how psychological violence poisons its victims and spreads through them for decades afterwards, is one of the play’s most interesting lines of thought. I would have liked to have seen it develop further with more than a few stray lines about Rolle’s never-on-stage children and exes.
The play perhaps suffers mainly from the fact that it tries to hold on to so many different threads and develop so many different themes around the basic theme of bullying. In addition to the aforementioned class theme and the aftershocks of suffering, there is also the unbalanced relationship with a “friend” (Riuttu) who takes the bully’s side as soon as he is pressed and hangs out with you only in secret. And then I haven’t even mentioned the implied act of violence that gave the play its name, where Rolle is close to practically inventing the school shooting as a phenomenon twenty years before Columbine.
Forgivable mistakes
Trying to keep too many balls in the air at the same time is a familiar mistake that debuting playwrights often make and thus it can be forgiven, but it becomes frustrating precisely because some themes really deserved further deepening. In addition to this, the play breaks the golden stylistic rule of “show, don’t tell” in a number of places and contains a few redundant pedagogical explanatory lines and scenes that spell out things that the viewer has already understood.
Some clichés that are used a little too frequently that give the impression of having been brought in only as building blocks to support the more intricate elements also disturb the final impression somewhat. I myself have been chosen last in gymnastics several times during my schooling, but there are more original ways to illustrate newly hatched alpha males’ power games in a recognizable way. But the whole thing still rowed safely into port (just like the rowing boat in a literally electrically charged scene towards the end). This is thanks to the play’s best moments of raw authenticity, whose more sophisticated bitter sharpness also makes the clichés easier to swallow.