Review: Eikä yksikään pelastunut
The Helsinki City Theatre’s Christie detective novel is an old-fashioned and elegant play in a good way
Helsinki City Theatre’s Christie detective novel is an old-fashioned and elegant play in a good way – the story was given depth by director Sakari Hokkanen’s psychological approach and fine acting
Yes, I fell into a hole. In the Helsinki City Theatre’s classic play from Agatha Christie’s detective novel And No One Saved Me, there was something downright enchanting. Dramaturg Sanna Niemeläinen and director Sakari Hokkanen had adapted an old-fashioned and elegant interpretation of Christie’s most famous murder mystery to the Arena stage in a good way.
Katariina Kirjavainen’s set design, which repeats the colours of hardwoods, and the costumes designed by Elina Kolehmainen, took us into the middle of the English class society of the last century. Of course, theatre cannot compete with film in an era. This performance highlighted what makes theatre so unique. That magic word is presence. I enjoy the disciplined and nuanced acting of the actors in the ensemble.
Theatre is the art of the moment and as such ageless. In my case, the great premiere of the Arena stage served as a time machine. The strong emotion it created took us to a time when theatre was fascinating, a bit hoopo and sometimes completely incomprehensible adult play from a child’s point of view.
The story of Christie’s most famous detective novel is probably familiar to every disabled bookworm like me. In the preface to the book, Christie says that he wanted to write a closed-space murder mystery in which all the characters in the story die without the story becoming ridiculous or the identity of the murderer being self-evident. According to him, the process was difficult and laborious. In the story itself, the author achieves the goal he has set. The mystery remains unsolved. However, according to Christie, she was forced to include an afterword to the book, in which everything is revealed.
In an interview on the theatre’s website, Hokkanen says that he approached the characters in the story through the concept of cognitive dissonance. The psychological concept describes the conflicts that arise when a person has incompatible beliefs and perceptions.
At the beginning of the story, those invited to the isolated island are accused on an audio record of homicides they have committed. Each of them tries to figure out their own actions as best they can. After that, the deadly carousel of the “murder mother” began to spin and the intensity of the play increased round by round, until the mystery was finally opened to us and it was all over.
Christie, who was born in 1890 in Victorian England, did not feast on violence or use foul and aggressive language, even though the story would have corpses born as if on a conveyor belt. The violence of the oppressive apparatus that maintains the class society had to be read between the lines.
The play’s Emily Brent (Heidi Herala) shows her contempt and contempt to Vera Claythorne (Anna Ackerman) because she has to earn a living as a secretary by doing paid work. This threat became visible when a noose was brought onto the scene at the end of the story. As a man of his time, Christie was undoubtedly also in favor of the death penalty.
Reality always goes hand in hand with detective stories written and presented for entertainment.
According to Hokkanen, the psychology of the story gains depth from the time of the book’s publication. The first edition of the book was published in Britain under the name Ten Little Niggers in November 1939. The world had been drawn into World War II a month earlier by Hitler’s German invasion of Poland. Today, we are perhaps in a very similar situation. Once again, our beliefs and hopes for the future do not fit well with the reality around us.
In the United States, Christie’s book was first published in 1940 under the title And Then There Were None. The name change tells us that the “canceling” of books is not a phenomenon of today. The song or poem Ten Little Niggers, which inspired Christie to write the story, has been part of the tradition of American minstrel theatre. In the overly racist minstrel show, also known as blackface theatre, African-Americans were portrayed as stupid, lazy, arrogant, cowardly, superstitious and joyfully happy.
Today, the poem, which predicts the events of the story, tells the story of ten little soldiers, whose porcelain figures were shattered one after the other in the play as death reaped its harvest.
In Finnish, Christie’s book was published in 1940 under the title And No One Was Saved in 1940, translated by Helka Varho. In the 60s, which was considered progressive, the name of the book changed unexpectedly in 1968. It was published under the name Ten Little Negro Boys until 2003.