Review: Matkalla Porkkalaan

IN THE TOWER AND AT THE FOOT OF THE TOWER

An Exciting Double Exposure of the Time of the Oversight Commission

With his play Matkalla Porkkalaan, hard-working professional writer Sami Keski-Vähälä overcomes a new genre of play, the documentary of recent history, and turns it into theatre. Director Milko Lehto is much looser in his approach and creates more functional theatre than in his previous work in the same series, The Eight Chosen Ones. It was a text by Heikki Ylikangas about the Jews handed over by Finland. Until now, the genre has been cultivated as a play by researchers, whose best creative contribution lies elsewhere than in the construction of situations.

Keski-Vähälä is a soft-spoken writer who masters many genres, and who lets his imagination run wild in just the right measure – and best of all – without the history buff ever having to squirm in his chair in shame. The absence of naïveté and moralizing are rare in today’s circumstances.

The topic has also been provided by Risto Nikku’s attractively written study Who Shot Captain Ivan Belov? (2003). The form for the play is taken from film noir and the transport of a police crime film, in which the suspect also begins to conduct investigations in his own direction. Niku’s and Keski-Vähälä’s versions differ precisely in terms of the medium, but excellently not in their thinking and depiction of the times. Love, spying and music have been added to the play as a picture of the time and mixed into the plot. Comedy has been obtained without missing anything from the razor-sharp pressure and paradox of the historical situation. “The shots at Mainila come to mind,” laments the Minister of the Interior. Was the murder of a Russian officer in Lauttasaari in Helsinki in November 1944 a provocation by the Soviet Union that, at worst, could justify the occupation?

Theatre researchers sometimes need to find out how the depiction of Russians on the Finnish stage has changed – and in what direction. Or has it changed at all? Keski-Vähälä has built a good double image. At the foot of the Tower, the defeated warriors drink just as hard as the Russians drunk on their victory on the upper floors of the Tower. The material of the Belov studies conveys a dense picture of Helsinki’s underworld, as Risto Niku reminds us in the programme. That is why On the Way to Porkkala is a play about more than just a murder investigation, which is finally solved in the spirit of Niku’s book.

Katariina Kirjavainen’s set design opens up and transforms into many things, even though the presence of tables and furniture slows down the changes. Maija Pekkanen dresses the people of the Depression carefully, but the role of music could have been considered. Of course, female roles were made with very few ingredients. The role of the main suspect Räsänen’s wife Eila has its own secrets (Ursula Salo), Valerie, an Ingrian Finnish interpreter, follows the stereotype of a more spy woman. (Vappu Nalbantoglu). The role of the actress and agent, Miss Rosenberg, was a treat for Riitta Havukainen.

Santeri Kinnunen’s detective Freedi Kekäläinen from Valpo is the centre of the play, the narrator – also the bewildered police officer who is friends with the suspect but knows his value and doses his information only in small emissions. Ilkka Heiskanen also acts in a genre that is familiar to him: the umpteenth soldier eaten by war is on the way – but somehow always convincing. He is the arrested officer Räsänen as the main suspect, the play’s amoeba, who, in the position of a criminal investigator’s confidant, helps the police, drinks at their home and, what is wilder, is twice involved in the night reception of the surveillance commission in Torni. Under the name of Deputy Police Officer Säränen, in the role of dramaturgical jester, Räsänen spouts truths or tells a new rumor, or hypothesis. And Zhdanov would not be Zhdanov if for him this Finn was not the “shabby and orderly man”.

Prime Minister U. J. Castrén and Minister of the Interior Kaarlo Hillilä – the delicious characters of Aarno Sulkanen and Heikki Sankari – who are written as helpless, walk around with shakets on, but they are overshadowed by the boldly playing Kekkonen – Matti Olavi Rani . From now on, he will always be wanted to be included in Torni when negotiations. And this is where it all begins, as the end of the play is looming when the first report of hidden weapons is brought. Belov’s murder will be left alone.

As the leader of the Russian team, Antti Litjan Zhdanov is, of course, the bravura of acting: a strikingly intelligent governor of a victorious power who quickly pushes out willpowers. Memories of Litja’s Mannerheim roles in recent years come to mind even more than a moustache of the dramaturgical task, the position of the sovereign spinner and the structural superiority of the unpredictable shooter. Mannerheim and Zhdanov are both allowed to speak bad Finnish by default, which is an additional treat. The difference, of course, is that Zhdanov did not speak Finnish at all. Seppo Maijala Feodoroff is left with surprisingly little action, Savonenkov’s character is allowed to talk more, but even in his case, the degree of professionalism of the actor was wondering.

With a short final image, the play suggests that “the crisis would be over” both in the country and in Räsänen’s private life. After all, this genre is a men’s play, in all its senses: men come to the theatre to see history and politics. Only in a couple of scenes did the cliché kill the interest, and that, in turn, is a pitfall for those who write in formats.

Still, long live this intelligent but loose way of dealing with political history!