Review: Punaorvot
Theatre review: When a working-class family is broken up – Red Orphans touches and hurts, but not by tearing
Deja vu: a large, emotionally shocking text, a performance divided into two different performance aesthetics and presentations during the intermission, and the end result is a theatrical experience that does not immediately leave you alone.
Lauri Maijala does it again. If there is any way to dare to talk about a formula in his case, it is that the two directions he has directed at the Helsinki City Theatre this year have followed the same pattern. This will also be his last for the time being, as he will return to the management of the Kom Theatre after his two-year visit to HKT
The Emily Brontë classic Humming Ridge, which premiered in the winter and was removed from the repertoire far too early due to the coronavirus, was divided into a frenzied moor section and a more serene on the surface, but equally driven by strong emotions.
The Red Orphans, directed by Lauri Maijala and co-written with Anneli Kanto, which premiered on Wednesday, is divided into the Helsinki 1918 part, which is more fragmented in its presentation but a little more traditional in its presentation, and the more surreal Ostrobothnia part in every way, which is sharpened with sharp cuts and time jumps. And again, miraculously, it works beautifully. Black and white do not mix into grey, or in the case of the Red Orphans, the miserable and the screaming red do not turn into a vague brown. The end result is difficult to define on the color chart, but it is bright.
Children of hard luck
Maijala manages to make a story that is basically small, but as an individual experience, a big story grow bigger than its parts. Red Orphans tells the story of the Johansson working-class family living in Kallio, Helsinki, who begin to disintegrate into atoms in the final chaos of the civil war in the spring of 1918. First, the father of the family, who has opted out of the rebellion, is quickly executed on the basis of his own denunciation. As a result of this and the loss of her baby, who is dying of starvation, mother Alma goes crazy, as she has been the family’s revolutionary activist whom her husband has saved from certain death sentence through his sacrifice. When Alma loses her zest for life, the family’s three remaining children, Aarre, Lahja and Ilona, are forced to cope with the misery of everyday life on their own. And to keep his mother in life like that.
Then the eyes of the authorities reach the Johansson family. In the eyes of the white social machine, the red orphans are seen not only as ragged people who are unable to survive, but also as potential threats in which the seeds of a new rebellion can germinate. So it is decided to send six-year-old Ilona away from Kallio to be re-raised in a foster family in South Ostrobothnia. 12-year-old Lahja does not leave her little sister, but demands to be allowed to join her.
And they do – only to realize that the sisters are separated into different families without the possibility of contact. Lahja’s attempts to get in touch with her mother, who stayed in Helsinki, and her brother, who ended up seeking solace in liquor, are also thwarted. Until one day the message gets through…
Helsinki 1918 and the twinpeaks of the plains
The first half of the performance of The Red Orphans thus follows the forms of a more traditional and realistic stage narrative, but it does not become a conventional historical drama either. The chronology is broken with flashbacks, the narrative with deliberate musical fragments that fit into the big picture.
Set designer Janne Vasama’s shabby stage image features a strangely twisted streetscape, ugly movables and human bodies (mannequins, of course) and , which are often wiped from the horizontal plane by lighting designer Kari Leppälä’s merciless spots. The scene is as harsh and desolate as the time described.
After the intermission, the audience is greeted by Aarre Johansson, who settles down in the stands to stagger, drunk but pleasantly sociable. And communally, wearing a mask on their faces. This alienating element drags on unnecessarily long, but when the curtain finally opens, you can see from the fiery red glow of the stage that something completely different is coming than what we have seen so far.
And so it happens, the expanse of South Ostrobothnia has never before opened up on stages like this! The second half is pure twinpeaks, not only with its pushy red, but also with its dreaminess and surreal cast of characters. Unlike the cult series by David Lynch and Mark Frost, this weirdness doesn’t get out of hand, but all the freaky carnivalization serves the whole.
Lahja’s foster family appears to be animalistic: the mother is a sow rocking in a rocking chair, her son is a little pig, and the evil master is some hard-to-define horned crested head – related to a wild deer? However, nobility is far from him.
Ilona’s family has two housewives whose childless everyday life is a gift from heaven. An already bright white world is illuminated by additional light. They are the most contradictory characters in the play, incomprehensible in their mercy. The harmonious Ilona is a good re-education for them, as the most harrowing scene of the performance will show.
Time to Overwhelm
When Lahja finally manages to send a letter to her mother, Alma, who has regained some of her strength, goes to pick up her daughters home. At this point, Maijala opens the viewers’ tear ducts at the latest. For the gift, the arrival of a mother is a salvation, but Ilona – now Sivia – is that… Who are you, what a mother, I don’t want to leave Iida and Sofia!
The final scene, in which the lullaby of the Shoemaker’s Lady (the one known for its “piupali, paupali” phrase), sung quietly in the first half, is now repeated by Ella Mettänen, who plays Alma, and accompanied by the rest of the cast. It concretizes Alma’s multiple pain of loss. It hurts, but beautifully. In the end, however, there is some consolation. The slowest closing of the curtain of this millennium, which is part of the scene, only adds to the strong charge.
Maijala’s characteristic sense of musical dramaturgical style is in full bloom in Red Orphans in other ways as well. The lullaby is accompanied by the Reds’ battle and mourning songs as well as songs from the White Finland songbook. However, not taking up too much space, but in small vignettes. The Oath of the Red Orphan, for example, played for a few moments somewhere in the background, as did Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights in Humming Ridge. All in all, the art of not underlining.
Adolescent children, adult adults
Instead, it must be emphasized in bold how well Maijala manages to make her ensemble play one voice again, even though it has been assembled from quite a few sources and even though there is a certain juxtaposition in the story and the range of roles.
Ella Mettänen, who plays the role of Alma, travels from strength to the brink of disintegration and back again is a powerful experience. It took the viewer into a tornado of emotions, where the viewer’s mind was swirled by the fiercest gusts of passion, warmth, pity, rejection, fear, and finally understanding and acceptance
In the child roles, the young(er) – but not the children – Wenla Reimaluoto (Lahja), Anna Böhm (Ilona) and Antti Autio (Aarre) play believably fine roles, throwing themselves into different ages, but without any applause or other infantilisms. The actors from the City Theatre’s own experienced cast offer a solid foundation for their younger counterparts in supporting roles.
At the theatre, Red Orphans has been given the subtitle History of the Silenced. In a way, it’s too grandiose, because on stage we see an individual story, a story of one family’s survival, not a historical spectacle. In a way, the adjective is also appropriate, as Maijala’s direction gives a face and a voice to all the children of Red families who were deprived of their father or mother or both or even their own selves in the turmoil of the Civil War.