Review: Kuka tappoi bambin?

Helsinki City Theatre’s adaptation of the novel Who Killed Bambi? explores how to stage sexual violence without objectifying the victim from Monika Fagerholm’s novel Who Killed Bambi? there are no less than two distinguished adaptations on display in Helsinki at the same time, one at the Helsinki City Theatre and the other at Teatteri Viirus. In its story, high school boys from well-to-do families living in a communally dense villa town are guilty of brutal gang rape of a girl of their age.

Like the book, the central character in the play, directed by Riikka Oksanen and dramatised by Pipsa Longa for the Helsinki City Theatre, is Gusten (Jaakko Hutchings at the age of 16, Pyry Nikkilä at the age of 25), who, about ten years after the events, still feels guilty in a contradictory way about both what happened and how he betrayed his accomplice in police interrogations and court proceedings.

The skill of Oksanen and Longa can be seen in the tension that holds the whole together in a kaleidoscopic manner at different time levels. As in the book, the main focus is on the causes and perpetrators of the crime, and not, for example, on the victim’s feelings. The play’s central dramaturgical solution is that he is not seen as a character at all, but his presence is based on a deliberate absence.

It is difficult to stage sexual violence, because at the same time it easily reinforces the structures of violence, even when the ethos of the work would be the opposite.  The chosen solution cleverly avoids this problem.

At the same time, in this way, the performance primarily turns its gaze to those power structures where the sense of social superiority and expectations related to gender roles are apt to produce such an obviously reprehensible act – and even to explain it for acceptance afterwards.

Although Fagerholm’s novel took place on the waves of the recent #metoo debate, adapting it to the stage in this day and age reveals that the need to deal with sexually exploitative structures has not disappeared.