Review: Faktiska händelser
When Förlaget announced last autumn that it was once again accepting manuscripts for reading through, the e-mail was filled with biographies, short stories and novel beginnings in no time. Most of it will never see the light of day – not everyone is made to be a writer, as literary as our Finland-Swedish culture is – but in all the works, I dare to guess, there is something that works. Something that has made the author take up the pen and want to offer his story to the world, a successful chapter, maybe just a paragraph, wording or insight.
Even if many books that are written do not hold up to being published works of art, I sometimes think it is a great shame that even those small grains of gold should go out with the rest of the letters. There should be some way to take advantage of it.
Lilla Teatern has managed to do exactly that with the play Actual Events, which premiered last Saturday. Through surveys on the theatre’s websites, real stories from ordinary people’s rather ordinary lives have been collected, which through Elisa Makarevitch’s dramaturgy and directed by Joakim Groth have been transformed into an entertaining evening, and a sympathetic and touching study of the smallness and grandeur of human life.
The performance is a two-hour emotional roller coaster, stripped of pretensions and where the ensemble’s presence, interaction and raw talent is all that is needed to carry and drive the illusion forward. The “fourth wall” towards the audience is not demolished, because it is never built up and the address fluctuates in a balanced way between show and tell.
Since the scenes that are played out are written – and lived – by dozens of different people with widely differing perspectives and perceptions of what constitutes a story worth telling, Actual Events becomes a journey on an undulating sea, where one moment you let yourself be dragged down under the waves and mesmerized by narratives and characters, only to be unsentimentally pulled to the surface with a “well, it was”. And so we throw ourselves further into the next, completely unrelated story.
To me, who lacks a deeper understanding of theatre theory and current trends in the international field, it seems that Groth and Makarevitch have succeeded in finding a completely new and titillating entertainment format, which, like the “novel of the state”, dissolves The Long Story, but still highlights the magical attraction and satisfaction that storytelling gives people. At the same time, the play reflects, celebrates and mocks the “ADHD culture” that is said to characterize our time – this is snippetification as an art form.
Smart and black humour is the main mood of the play, and you are awakened to the realisation of how different things in life it are that worry, irritate or delight different people. At the same time, the intuitive understanding and empathy that we have for each other as conspecifics becomes apparent. I don’t always know if we laugh at someone in their willfulness – or with.
Towards the end, the audience is thrown into the depths of the darkest that life has to offer via a couple of horribly poignant monologues, but you just have to hold your breath and swallow quietly. The heavier numbers break sharply with the light-heartedness that one would have liked to stay in, but at the same time they confirm the respect that the working group wants to show to all its “victims”, that is, those who have shared stories, often very significant, from their lives. Perhaps the empty chairs at the premiere testified to the fact that everyone who contributed with their story may not have wanted or dared to come to see their fate, their life choices and their consequences played out?
The fine acting and the respectful and fast-paced realization on stage give the stories such dimensions that are difficult, if not impossible, to produce in “only” text. Still, I return to the idea of whether it wouldn’t work to cut out the best parts from rejected manuscripts and just line up the fragments in common binders: A collection of well-described moments and feelings, hilarious coincidences and anecdotes, perhaps a thought-provoking monologue and the occasional pointless but drawn-out family history. Gemstones in a rotten wooden box with rusty fittings. An unconscious collaboration for a common greater cause.
The dirt and beauty of life, without any explanation.