Review: Juoksuhaudantie

The Red Nose Trench Road

Red Nose Company’s hilarious two-man musical comedy “The Trench Road” is getting a new arrival on the Arena stage in Hakaniemi.

Premiered about three years ago, “The Trench Road”, which succulently combines clowning, improvisation, singing, playing, theatre and literature, was produced for a re-premiere on the Arena stage of the Helsinki City Theatre.
In the auditorium before the performance, the idea of a sharp and dense Finlandia Prize-winning novel interpreted by two actors dressed in red noses tickled me: “How on earth are they going to do this?”

Kari Hotakainen’s “Trench Road” starts with a situation where Matti Virtanen, a man on the “home front”, is about to lose his family due to one hasty swipe. While fulfilling the list of cooking, childcare and other requirements imposed on a modern man, the conscientious man got nervous only once, and as a result, seems to fall into nothingness. A man wandering along the jogging trails in the suburbs accidentally stumbles upon the idyll of front-line soldiers’ houses, and the solution is in front of his eyes. Would it make the wife reverse the decision to divorce if she bought the family the wooden house of her dreams, at any price – or by any means? The theatre audience does not need to know more about the story of the book, as they can throw themselves into the performance.

Before the Arena’s re-premiere, “Trench Road” has toured around the country for more than 70 performances. The props for the performance of the touring theatre Red Nose Company can be transported almost in the trunk when necessary.
The minimalist set design is crystallized in a red velvet curtain, which hides minor changes. The equally sparse light expression is based on the spotlight and ramp light of the variety show times of a century ago, without levelling side and rear lights.
You couldn’t get much closer to the core of the theater: in these circumstances, the actor decides the game. And, of course, the director, although he also has to look at the conventions of theatre from a new angle if he has been given the task of directing two clowns: Zin (Timo Ruuskanen) and Mike (Tuukka Vasama).

Director Otso Kautto has had to ask himself how improvisation – creative madness – is directed. The trick is how to push the insights forward, to the next rehearsals and move towards the public performance without losing the edge.
They seemed to have moved well. The re-premiere served delicious passes and clever booths that seemed to be built on routine, but born in an instant, from the interaction between the performers and the audience. As Hotakainen’s text and the associations arising from it overlapped, the performers sometimes had to dig out the paperback version of the original work and check which page they were on.

And you can’t tell everything about a book of over 300 pages with a couple of men and in a couple of hours, especially in a presentation that seems to sprawl over its framework from time to time. For example, the real estate agent, who is one of the central characters in the book, is not present in the play at all. So the pruning has been done and darlings have been listed. And that’s what it is, dramaturgy.

In the two-man “The Trench Road”, the live music takes a strong grip as the driver of the story and the background of the atmosphere. Ruuskanen and Vasama are competent guitarists and good singers: with the accompaniment of steel-stringed acoustics, they sometimes sing in voices, sometimes in unison. Ruuskanen is most naturally attracted to the baritone growls of David Bowie and Depeche Mode, while Vasama would sing “So lonely”, familiar from the Police’s debut album, the melody of which runs in the register of a second stone typical of the young Sting.

There are good reasons for the live music of the performance: there is a direct link from the productions of Johnny Cash, Neil Young and U2, among others, to the book, for which the pop music of a certain era serves as a great comfort and lifeline for the middle-aged protagonist.

Red Nose Company’s performance tampens the darkest tones of Hotakainen’s book’s alleyway and leaves the viewer with a lighter mood in its conclusion. And when the performance comments on the book it uses as its subject, the author himself is not always spared from the jokes: “Kari Hotakainen got six percent of your money, even though he didn’t do anything here tonight!”

“The Trench Road” will be performed at the Arena during November, and only a few times. The fast eat the slow.