★★★★

Documentary theatre often works by providing an opportunity to witness an observation together, often difficult or difficult to see. It gives you the opportunity to tell things directly, but at the same time with distance.

When documentary theatre is clearly created in a community and it is made specifically for it, it gives the theatre the opportunity to create more than just a performance. It creates a community, even if it is temporary.

It is precisely this unique work that Lilla Teatern’s performance Actual Events is about.

What did people look like back then, a long time ago, when there was salt in the sugar container? How does a person who is constantly sexually abused talk about their own experience? What is it like to travel by bus in South America after drinking two bottles of wine? What are the adopted child’s expressions of affection for the new parent? These are some of the questions that can be answered in Lilla Teatern’s performance.

The script is based on texts collected from Lilla Teatern’s viewers, in which they tell which event of their life they would like to see on stage. In the performance, which consists of almost a hundred answers and interviews, the actors (Birthe Wingren, Linda Zilliacus, Niklas Häggblom, Joachim Wigelius, Alexander Wendelin and Kira-Emmi Pohtokari) put themselves in the shoes of their audience.

The work simultaneously encloses in its inner circle and opens up to outsiders as a kind of portrait of the theatre. On the level of dramaturgy, the performance could perhaps be more strongly its own independent performance organism, it may have conventional solutions whose cliché does not always seem entirely intentional.

Director-writer Joakim Groth has been honing his directing method based on authentic presence for decades. Acting includes a huge scale of different levels of empathy. The actors position themselves as outlines. In the end, each viewer gets to color the picture themselves, and that’s what the audience really does. The audience cries, laughs, is amazed and shocked by their self-image without the actors having to push and force.