Review: Lempi
Helsinki City Theatre: Lempi One of the best Finnish novels of 2016 was Minna Rytisalo’sLempi. Its beautiful language and tense atmosphere transferred nicely to the stage in Helsinki.
Only three actors and a few dresses. The simple environment is not sprawling, but it creates just the right atmosphere; barren, the beauty of nature, why not also the scarcity of the time of the story, the final stages of the Lapland War, with its black and white colours. An environment where every detail is highlighted.
We don’t see Lemppi, but we get to know her twin sister well (played by Ursula Salo). They were mirrors and trusted friends to each other, and from a young age they worked in their father’s shop in Rovaniemi until their sister’s student days. Her father wanted them to get an education, but Lempi decided otherwise. She would get married!
The young farmer Viljami (Sauli Suonpää as Viljami) is shopping at the store, and it is not difficult to make him fall in love. When the couple walks down the aisle, the man is on the hills of happiness, dreaming of the future. Everything is still fine. But the war takes Viljami away from home, and Lempi is left to run the space alone. Or not quite, because she has been given an assistant girl Elli to do the heaviest work. Elli is played by Vappu Nalbantoglu.
Elli doesn’t like Lemppi, she thinks he’s important, lazy and mean – and from her point of view, he might be. However, Elli, who has been taught to be humble, gets a living and a home in return for her work, and Lempi would not be able to manage without her, as she says.
Then Lempi disappears. Elli takes care of the children, of whom there are already two, and writes to Viljami in distress to the front that she takes care of the boys. As befits wartime, everything is confusing. Viljami’s head at least when he has to get used to the idea of the death of his beloved. However, she finally arrives at home, where Elli and the children are waiting.
Her sister’s life turned out differently: she falls in love with a German soldier. Lempi’s disappearance is a hard blow. And the romance doesn’t end well, as history unfortunately often tells.
The fates of all four people are intertwined in tormenting ways that raise chills. Even though I knew the plot after reading the book, I was still nervous! There is enough hook to watch the performance again and find even more of it. In the play, the ending is explained more extensively than in the book, where it remained a reference, if I remember correctly. This is not a war story, but excitement in the crossfire of dreams, love, fears and desires.
The performance is full of emotions that the actors conveyed to the audience in an amazingly genuine way. At first, I was afraid of emotionality, because I’ve sometimes been embarrassed in the theatre about it slipping into an over-the-top, farcical one without a purpose. But not from these creators! They also perform well with quick exchanges and nuances of emotions. I would especially like to thank Sauli Suonpää. The role of the sister may have been the most demanding in terms of her range of emotions, Elli’s the clearest, even though she grows from a girl to a woman and becomes an increasingly dominant character as the story progresses.
I would like to thank the strong atmosphere, the skilful acting and the views of the stage, which highlighted the twists and details of the story itself. The author’s beautiful language is there, many sentences I was left pondering, the book must be read again!
For whom: For lovers of a dense atmosphere, for those who tolerate emotions, for those who seek psychological tension, for those who are enthusiastic about the beauty of language.
Review in the Culture Flourishes blog.