Review: Sinun, Margot
Theatre review: Love over the Iron Curtain and hidden memories will still hurt the next generation
The stage adaptation of the novel You, Margot is one of the highest-quality Finnish premieres of this decade.
When I started writing for this magazine at the end of the 1980s, there was a wooden stove in the brick-and-mortar of the editorial office’s neighboring building, which was maintained by the “League of Friendship of Peoples”. However, it disappeared in the autumn of 1990, for some reason.
That office, which I passed by almost daily at the time, was home to the GDR-Kulturzentrum, which, as the name suggests, aimed to foster cultural relations between the German Democratic Republic and Finland. It certainly did that, and based on the program posters in the office windows, it was active, but there was talk that the center had other tasks as well. Those rumours were strongly associated with the abbreviation Stasi.
That zentrum on the corner of Paasipuisto, and the slight anxiety it caused in the past, came back to me strongly when I watched the dramatised play Sinun, Margot, based on Meri Valkama’s award-winning debut novel, on the big stage of the Helsinki City Theatre. The cultural and media relations between the GDR and Finland in the 1980s are a strong sub-theme in the play, although it is primarily an emotionally stirring drama about a family’s hidden painful memories, unearthing them and the reorganisation of a young woman’s identity.
YOURS, MARGOT is set in two eras and two countries. We take turns in both the late 1980s and the 2010s, both in Helsinki and East Berlin. For Markus Siltanen, the male protagonist of the play’s flashback episodes, the GDR-Kulturzentrum is certainly a familiar organisation when he starts working as a correspondent in Berlin. At the Media Centre for Foreign Journalists, she creates close relationships with her domestic colleagues as well as East German cultural and media personalities. As a dogmatic socialist, Markus respects the system of his host country without questioning its cynical basic nature and the perversities that restrict individual freedom.
East Germany’s secret police, more officially the “State Security Ministry” Stasi, are breathing down journalists’ necks all the time, no matter what country they come from.
Markus, who has taken his family to Berlin, meets Louise Seidel from East Berlin, who works as a kindergarten teacher at the progressive kindergarten where Markus and his wife Rosa’s children are, at a party.
When half of Markus’s family has to move back to Finland soon due to his son’s health problems, Markus has time and space to deepen his relationship with Louise, to fall in love for real. Daughter Vilja, who stayed in Berlin with her father, is still so young that she does not understand the integral role of this second “but” in her father’s life.
And you won’t understand until a quarter of a century later, while rummaging through the estate of your deceased father, you find a bunch of longing letters, all of which are signed “Yours, Margot”. (In their correspondence, Markus and Louise have hidden themselves under the first names of East Germany’s number one couple, Erich and Margot Honecker.)
Yours, Margot is basically a triangle drama involving Markus, his entire family, and Louise. In a way, however, it condenses into a drama between two people who live quite far from each other, which takes on a bit of a thriller-like tone as Vilja begins to dig diligently, and regardless of her own mother’s blunders, into her father’s past and Louise’s personality. The heavy door of the Chamber of Secrets cracks open scale by scale.
ON THE BIG STAGE of the City Theatre, which is mostly dedicated to musicals, farces and other lighter-hearted theatre for the general public, it is rare to see a domestic premiere drama that would take over the space with such light structures. Director Riikka Oksanen has dared to trust in the power of Meri Valkama/Tuomas Timonen’s text and has not set out to fill the “airport stage” with any tinsel or spectacle. Toni Haaranen’s impressive lighting solutions create the greatest visual effects on the scantily staged stage (in the East German spirit?).
In this play, even the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident and its consequences and the fall of the Berlin Wall are depicted in a simplified way. But they are subplots in the story, as the most important thing is very self-centered: Vilja wants to know how her family’s life has really gone, and at the same time, how she has become her.
Oksanen’s stage narrative is enchantingly intense, even though there can be a lot of physical emptiness between people on stage, and the dramaturgy also dares to use silence as part of the dialogue. The continuum of scenes overlaps two times and cities without any problems, albeit boldly and demandingly. Thus, from the viewer’s point of view, the performance is like a party’s recent election slogan: it wants to keep everyone on board. And it does, from the first entrances to the extremely beautiful final moment, where the last line is: “Yours, Vilja.” In the auditorium, handkerchiefs were already being dug out, and no drops were wiped from the beak.
In addition to that ending, you can pick out a couple of other scenes from the great whole that bring tears to your feet in different ways. When Vilja meets her father’s old friend Sebastian on her expedition in Berlin, she has a glimpse into her father’s circle of friends in the 1980s. Those friends come to the spacious stage as dance couples, each under tightly framed spotlights. Phew, what power!
The Christmas scene of the Siltanen family in the company of their friends, on the other hand, is unparalleled in its wildness. The Christmas idyll is far away, the end of the frantic wait in a crying fit is a reality. By the way, Riikka Oksanen seems to have a special ability to direct adults in child roles so that the characters are completely believable without infantile gibberish – the same thing was seen in the Group Theatre’s Fake Mothers a couple of years ago.
The previously mentioned Chernobyl scene is quite glued on as a whole, as Vilja tries to find information about the missing Louise all the way from the devastated area to the ruins of the power plant city that has become a tourist attraction, but it is also very eloquent.
What I missed from Tuomas Timonen’s commendable dramatization was a sharper treatment of the themes of political opportunism. Now, the patchy-eyed running along appears more comical than tragic, which is what the manipulation of the Deedeer-like state machine has ultimately been. Similarly, the presence of the Stasi could have been more tangible than just in the form of the cartoonish whistleblower recruiter Topaz.
THE ROLE OF VILJA, which stretches between 2 and about 25 in the age range, is played by Satu Tuuli Karhu. I saw her on stage for the first time in 2016 in Romeo and Juliet at the Finnish National Theatre, where she had been prompted to play the role of Juliet due to a change of actor, and since then she has been impressed by her warmth-radiating character as an actor. Whether he is the grandson of Lisa Pimpso or the Devil. Grain plays a role in that thermometer at the level of heat readings, her journey towards her own past is unconditionally included.
Sara Soulié was already known to me only for her impressive film and TV roles. Based on them, I could guess that something special could be on offer live. And it was: Soulié has some mystical built-in charisma that broke through as soon as he (after quite a long wait) walked onto the stage. In this context, Walk can be a disparaging expression of his movement language, because as a dancer, his body language is as versatile as his actual ḱiel skills, which cover more or less the entire countries of the Baltic Sea region.
Sanna June Hyde is impressive as Rosa Siltanen, who has lived in a heavy lie for a long time, while Markus, played by Martin Bahne, is more mundane but apt as a role. Of the smaller roles, for example, Samuli Pajunen, who plays Vilja’s older brother Matias with piety, is remembered.
In terms of its central themes – hidden memories, the big sore point growing from the family’s past, the exploitation of human dignity by the former communist countries – are somewhat related to another work that has been successful both in the theatre and as a novel. Sofi Oksanen’sThe Purge became a landmark work, first at the National Theatre and only then as a novel. In the case of Meri Valkama’s work, the marching order is different, but in terms of quality, the pace is obviously the same, as Yours, Margot is so far the best Finnish premiere at the Tokoinranta Theatre House this decade.
Review on the Democrat website.