Review: Riistapolku
Riistapolku – Helsinki City Theatre The Helsinki City Theatre presents “a song about the difficulty of loving”, as director Lauri Maijala says. The Game Trail is a family tragedy that brings up difficult topics with a human touch. This is a touching performance and the viewer is clearly not meant to be spared.
The Game Path is a play by Franz Xaver Kroetz that has only been seen in Finnish professional theatres twice before. It repeats Kroetz’s typical themes of violence and depiction of the working class. The play is based on a real crime that took place in Germany in 1967.
A small German industrial town serves as the stage for a tragedy in which the family’s 13-year-old daughter Hanni falls in love with 19-year-old Franz. Society hits hard and a tension arises that the girl tries to fight against. The father of the family, Erwin, reacts strongly to the situation, and Hanni ends up in the position of a victim from two different directions. Mother Hilda acts as a conciliatory character until she seems to collapse herself.
Ursula Salo as a mother collapses really nicely. This is a role that could easily have been overdone, but Salo manages to gesture very well so that the emotions come through completely natural and recognizable. Risto Kaskilahti as a father is a true father figure who cracks dad jokes in his underwear. Exactly the kind of role you would imagine suited Kaskillahti. When a father loses his temper, it is a surprising and big shock to the audience. The comedic character is Pekka Huotari in the role of Franz’s friend, Dieter. Huotari does overdo it. High and hard, but in an incomprehensible way, this solution fits the tragic play perfectly.
The roles of Hanni and Franz are played by Ella Mettänen and Paavo Kinnunen. Damn, these were freezing and wonderful to watch. Mettänen’s slightly nasal teenage girl’s voice and Kinnunen’s lazy nudging created poetry that was both comical and so coldly realistic. Mettänen gave a delicate and strong performance, which will surely be remembered as the best experiences of this year in the theatre.
The atmosphere of the play was created right at the beginning when we watched the black-and-white play. I still don’t really understand how this was done, because in one moment the colors just appeared in the play as if it were a magic trick. However, the tone still remained nostalgic from the 70s, and Elina Kolehmainen’s costume design and Antti Mattila’s set design also offered a great journey through time.
A realistic depiction of the time came in handy, as it offered at least a little distance from the themes of the work. The play is clear and controlled. It deals with violence, love and family in a seemingly straightforward way, but leaves a lot of room for emotions. It is as if it forces the viewer to deal with the subject on both an emotional and a rational level.
The play takes elements that we consider clear and breaks them down into parts. The boundaries between victim and actor are blurred and human autonomy is considered. Director Lauri Maijala writes in the script:
“We have not yet really learned to control the self made by our fathers, mothers and society, our children, or our humanistic values (which are so easily scrapped when the earth shakes from under us). We wonder how the same hands that are capable of gentle caresses hit the one who was once promised to protect? We are afraid of losing the other person, we tie them to ourselves so that they do not run away – and then they run away. Of course.”
The desire to maintain a life in accordance with one’s own values can lead to extreme conflicts. The closer the person, the greater the conflict and situations tend to unravel in some way. The play depicts this process in its extreme conditions. This creates an uncomfortable zone for the viewer, but also just damn good drama.
More information about the performance can be found on the Helsinki City Theatre website. It’s worth keeping in mind that the play is loud and realistically violent at times (albeit justifiably). I strongly recommend experiencing this if you are interested in traditional and emotionally powerful theatre.
Maijala’s Pasi Was Here and Blood Roses have remained in the personal top ten of all the theatre I’ve seen, and Riistapolku continues in the same vein.