Review: Rasande Stillestånd

Raging Standstill at Lilla Teatern is an existential reflection of our own time, seen through a declamatory early modernist theatre form and based on texts by Edith Södergran and Hagar Olsson. On stage, young theatre students collaborate with the play’s creator and director Rasmus Slätis.

Witness, seer, oracle. Writers can be much more than a mirror of their own moods, ideas, and opinions. Sometimes the texts break free from their personal, temporal and contextual limitations. Like buds when they suddenly turn into flowering.

Edith Södergran’s (1892-1923) poetry is in its moments exuberant, sky-stormy and mysteriously visionary. The excitement can be linked to the seer tradition, where predictions about the future are presented wrapped in difficult-to-interpret oracle language. The truth comes shrouded in mist, you must be able to read the contours of the first incomprehensible and to realise – usually when it is too late – the very obvious.

The Greek god of wine, Dionysus, is usually associated with the excited – in the religious cult around Dionysus, ecstasy and unleashedness were central. Although Edith Södergran’s private life did not leave much room for debauchery, her poetry is all the more ecstatic, both in her general attitude to life and specifically in relation to sexuality.

It is also influenced by the ideas of its time, not least the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death, assuming the role of seer in the book Så talar Zarathustra (1883-85).

Each other’s opposites

Despite their close friendship, Hagar Olsson (1893-1978) in his role as a writer can be described as at least partly the opposite of Södergran. At least it is this contradiction that I read into Lilla teatern’s production Furious Standstill.

It is entirely made up of texts or text fragments from Södergran’s poetry from the late 1910s and Hagar Olsson’s now rather forgotten novel På Kanaanexpressen (1929). Of course, this difference, like all other differences, is “relative” – even Hagar Olsson has been described in his time as excited and characterized by pathos.

The textual parts of the play that appear to be by Hagar Olsson speak of objectivity, the new man and of propaganda in contrast to poetry. God may be dead, but he has now also been buried in favor of a man who, in an elated collective spirit, builds the future. To take the ancient trace to an end, one can attach the word Apollonian to Hagar Olsson’s texts. They are carried by a desire for rationality.

There are just over ten years between the publication of Södergran’s poetry and Olsson’s novel, ten revolutionary years. In 1919, Nietzsche’s declaration of death by God is still a central topic of conversation, and the Art Nouveau style remains in architecture and design.

In modernism, futurism still has some validity, and if you want to look for an external link to Södergran’s ecstasy and Olsson’s aptitude for propaganda, the futuristic mystery play Victory over the Sun (1913) is an interesting stylistic parallel – which linguistically also has similarities to Furious Standstill. In Victory over the Sun , the goal of humans is to defeat and even take down the sun, a strange hybrid of absolute optimism and pitch-black pessimism.

Yet it is the contradiction between these texts’ deep-rooted belief in change and in the future (that there really is an almost infinite future) and the moment we ourselves live in, characterized by war cramps, climate anxiety and anguish about the future – and that the future is something that passed by without us even noticing.

High-octane energy

Rasmus Slätis (direction and concept) and a group of students from the Theatre Academy have charged Raging Standstill with high-octane energy and start with the accelerator pedal almost to the bottom. This has its consequences for the future, as this gives less leeway for dramatic escalation. Rather, the piece follows an inverted curve, where quieter parts stand in clear relief against the loud and high-flown.

Improvisation is central to Raging Standstill, the piece begins (even before the bell has rang for the beginning of the play) with a kind of exercises in which the actors improvise, instructed through more or less abstract drawings. It is equal parts early modernism and later Dada, where a cautious beginning quite soon takes the mark of cackling in cacophony (it turns out that the bird metaphor runs through the production).

The wave movement in Raging Standstill goes from excited dancing and singing to declamation. Perhaps it is not God who has died in our time, but the theatre theorist Stanislavsky and his tradition of “method-acting”. The total empathy has been replaced here by the expressive expression. Not against me. There is something beautiful in this type of theatre that ties in with an older and much more rhetorical tradition than what we have gradually become accustomed to during the 20th century.

An existential experience

Many of the young actors’ performances are absolutely brilliant, and especially Antonia Atarah, whose precision in a rather subordinate role comes across as controlled and precise. Sara Pirhonen also seems to thrive in this declamatory theatre, where the dialogue between the actors is subordinate and the voices are almost consistently addressed directly to the audience.

Likewise, it is difficult to go past the anchor in the production, the students’ teacher at the Theatre Academy Stina Engström, who primarily supports the more low-key text fragments.

But it is also exciting to observe when the roles are not completely filled by the performances. The actors are not finished, it makes the faces more naked, more unintentionally readable and even vulnerable. The experienced actor’s rubber face has not yet grown out, which is also fascinating to see.

Incredibly talented is the musician and on stage, Joonas Leppänen, who is also the composer. His agility in following both notes, acting and improvising is impressive.

In the end, it is an existential experience that awaits you at Lilla Teatern. Raging Downtime is not a perfect production, but it is alive, intense and at times weakly vulnerable. Without our current troubled moment on earth being mentioned or touched upon, the present makes itself strangely reminiscent throughout the performance. Where the dramatic propulsion is lacking, the presence is all the stronger in every way.