Review: Faktiska händelser

Lilla Teatern asked its viewers to share their bits and pieces of life. What is their best decision? What do they regret? What scene of their lives would they like to see on the stage of Lilla Teatern?

Based on these questions, the play Actual Events has been born. As the name suggests, it is based on real events told by viewers.

From this point of view, a play resembling a mixed soup could be created, because a coherent common thread is missing. However, the play, dramatised by Elisa Makarevitch and directed by Joakim Groth, is a surprisingly controlled whole.

The play starts with the actors introducing themselves. They get to answer the same broad questions that were asked of the audience. The questions reveal that there is a surprisingly heterogeneous group on stage. There is a Christian, an Orthodox, an atheist and something in between.

After that, it’s time for the answers sent by the viewers. Some of them have been made into their own dramatised scenes. Some of them hit the ground running even without dramatization. Sometimes just telling the events is enough.

Life is a journey

Quite a few stories sent by the audience are on a journey. We are on a train, bus or taxi. This journey can be understood as a metaphor for living. Life is a journey that includes many things.

For example, actress Birthe Wingren tells the story of a commuter train where two drunks were nibbling on their bottles in the back seat. At the station, the drunks started to empty their bladder when the train started moving. One of the drunks made it to the ride, but the other was left hanging on the door handle. The viewer who sent the memory was the only one who dared to pull the emergency brake even at the risk of being fined.

This memory represents the most cheerful part of the first half of the play. The same series includes Niklas Häggblom’s adventure in the hospital with his butt bare and Kira-Emmi Pohtokari’s attempts to find the love of life on a dating site.

Undoubtedly, the best part of the play is available after the intermission. If the first half contains hilarious memories, the second is made up of the most painful ones.

The longest applause in the play goes to Birthe Wingren. Sitting still, she tells a grim story of sexual abuse. There was an uncle next door who groped a little girl and tried to rape her in the berry forest. And the uncle was not the only abuser. The harshest thing of all is that these events are also experienced by some viewers.

Topics that divide politics and opinions are not shy away from

In Lilla Teatern’s play, the #metoo movement and climate change are given a surprising position. As far as I understand, they were not specifically asked about them in the survey sent to the viewers. Still, they come up several times.

The voice is given to both the exploited and the viewer dreaming of group. Not to mention the opponent of nuclear power and the spectator who perceives climate change as the hysteria of young people. In other words, the play does not shy away from topics that divide politics and opinions.

Actual Events is an interesting experimental play in which you don’t know what to expect when you go to the theatre. It offers a voyeur into the everyday life of ordinary people like a BB house, but the senders of the stories remain anonymous. The most important thing is not the people behind the stories, but the stories themselves.

A group of six actors tell stories, sing and play as if at an evening campfire. The stories show the whole spectrum of life, from happy moments to those moments when life seems to collapse. The stories are sent by individual people, but the topics are universal. There are births and deaths. Life is a collection of events between the two.