Review: Maratontanssit
Stakes at the roulette table of life – a classic of recession depictions succeeds on stage
Theatre students perform the classic Marathon Dances with a frenzy of desperation but skill, on stage on the small stage of the Helsinki City Theatre.
Author Horace McCoy’s novel Let’s Shoot Horses (1935) is one of the classics of depression depictions. In addition to the hunger and distress of the masses in the 1930s USA, the work also reflects a more timeless plight in any part of the world – at any time.
I have seen the work as a Sydney Pollack film (1969), on stage a long time ago at the KOM Theatre and recently at Teatteri Vanha Juko – and now as a version of the Theatre Academy’s Marathon Dances at the Helsinki City Theatre. Different kinds of work, all done in a shocking way.
The rotating floor of the small side of the City Theatre – one of our finest stages, by the way – has been staged as a roulette table, on which these poor people run in circles literally for their lives.
The cooperation between the City Theatre and the Theatre Academy is rewarding, both for the audience and for the students.
There are three young couples. Only one of them, whose strength lasts the longest to dance, would receive a check for a thousand dollars, the others would get nothing! A grueling, very degrading show, and the most widely allegorical – let those poor fight with each other…
The terrible, desperate setting is not only touchingly but also densely constructed. The situation escalates moment by moment into a more distressing, humanly increasingly bare playoff. Without explaining the climax, we can say that the play proceeds according to an unshakable logic. Until the end.
Society is a merciless machine: everyone paddles their own canoe; Crying does not help in market economies. Marathon Dances, the extreme of the individualistic philosophy of freedom, warns against such thoughts.
The play rolls with skill and youthful enthusiasm. Heidi Räsänen has directed a performance that combines great drive with slower-focusing scenes. The simple stage images work handsomely, and the music is varied with the notes and verses of the popular 1930s tango Pieni sydän. “Noble and low spirit…”
It is a pleasure to get to know new emerging talents in theatre art, there are many interesting characters. A dozen actors fill the stage, with varying parts and emphases. Only Gloria and Robert dance as named protagonists, who are interpreted by whomever at any given time.
Such a collective subject is a dramaturgical solution that successfully emphasizes the broader view of the play. What happens to one can just as well happen to anyone.
Future actors are also interested in the idea of the play. When so many expensively educated professionals are in danger of ending up wasting their skills in all kinds of TV channel spede jobs, the situation should be fixed somehow. Couldn’t the country’s larger institutional theatres agree that each of them hires at least one graduated actor every autumn – at least for one season? Surely no one can aim to be a TV contestant or chatterbox?
The cooperation between the City Theatre and the Theatre Academy is rewarding, both for the audience and for the students. We get to follow the work of professionals starting their careers, and they get to present their skills with proper resources, spectacularly, to the right audiences. One student even wrote her thesis for the marathon dances , lighting designer Outi Vedenpää. He did it in style.
Thank you to the actors and director, the whole group.