Review: Sinun, Margot
Yours, Margot at the Helsinki City Theatre – a wonderful realisation of a best-selling novel on stage
When you are fascinated by Meri Valkama’s book Sinun, Margot, love spoken plays and are a fan of director Riikka Oksanen, your expectations for the theatre performance are frighteningly high. It is even more incredible that all possible expectations were met!
The premiere of You, Margot at the Helsinki City Theatre was the most enjoyable theatre in a long time, an absolutely fantastic production! Now the problem is, how on earth can I do justice to everything we see. As an acquaintance at the coat racks said after the performance: “I wished the performance would never have ended!” Another said that the performance was a must-see again. Air and I nodded and wiped away the tears of emotion raised by the final scene.
From the book to the stage
Meri Valkama’s book Sinun, Margot is rich in content and has 556 pages. Dramatizing it for the stage has required strict choices about what to include, what is essential for the whole and, above all, whether the play will become a social report on the good and bad sides of the GDR and what happened after the reunification of Germany, or whether the focus will be on the life stories of the main characters and the narrator Vilja’s exploration of her family’s past.
On stage, we saw the excellently crystallized Sinun, Margot. It was a compelling story about people, regardless of nationality, whose relationships were affected by the everyday reality of the GDR.
The main character, Vilja, in her thirties, is looking for a healthy past for herself in order to move forward in the present. He has found letters in the estate of his recently deceased father, signed Yours, Margot. The letters talk about a little girl, Vilja. Vilja herself does not remember the events described in the letters, and she has no idea who Margot is. Clearly, this is a person who was in a relationship with Vilja’s father when they lived in East Berlin in the 1980s because of his father’s work. Vilja’s mother refuses to discuss the past, so Vilja goes on a fact-finding trip to Berlin.
The main stage of the Helsinki City Theatre emphasised the intimacy of the story of You, Margot. On the stage were frames made of metal pipes, which could be imagined to symbolize the Iron Curtain of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall or the structures of East German concrete architecture. These images were supported by video images projected in the background, for example, of the lights of Berlin or the fall of the wall. In the background of it all stood East Berlin’s most famous landmark, a symbol of technological development, the Fernsehturm, or TV Tower. A large and hard external world had been created on the stage, within which the events were concentrated in small spaces: different living rooms, hospital rooms, offices or the corridor of a kindergarten. In these spaces, highlighted by light spots and delimited by walls, significant things in life happened.
One of the challenges of the book is the different time levels, but it was tackled excellently on stage. At least for us, those who read the book carefully, it was never at all unclear what time or place we were in. When Vilja’s head was in turmoil, we got to see two different time levels side by side on stage. At times, the scenes froze in stills according to the photographs. Smoothly at Berlin airport, in one moment, a mother pushed her child in a luggage cart and immediately another mother pushed her own child in the same place about twenty-eight years earlier. Satu Tuuli Karhu, who played Vilja, also glided smoothly from an adult woman to a toddler to the floor level as the scene shifted to the past. Amazing!
The whole was very cohesive. The music complemented the image of the time and the atmosphere. The habitus created with clothes and accessories took me to the right time. A car resembling a Trabant, which has become a symbol of East Germany, had also been brought onto the stage. Or maybe it was a genuine Trabi.
The Sinun, Margot design team has included director Riikka Oksanen, dramaturg Tuomas Timonen, set designer Antti Mattila, costume designer Tiina Kaukanen, lighting designer Toni Haaranen, sound designer Eradj Nazimov, make-up designer Milja Mensonen and responsible dramaturg Ari-Pekka Lahti.
The actors lived up to expectations
The entire ensemble and backing crew of You, Margot can be congratulated for the excellent smooth timing. The floor rotates, time, clothes and scenes change on the fly, but everything proceeds naturally and flows.
The star of the play is Satu Tuuli Karhu, who played Vilja. I had seen her once before on stage, in 2018 as Juliet at the National Theatre and as Juliet in Romeo, and even then I had praised her. Now it is worth continuing the same praise, because he made an internalized, profound and extraordinarily authentic interpretation of Vilja. Nothing artificial, but a genuine feeling of a young woman on the threshold of searching and finding herself. Brava!
Sara Soulié as Luise Seidel and Sanna-June Hyde as Vilja’s mother Rosa also did a great job. Sara Soulié was aware, loving and demanding at the same time. His role brought out Luise’s pain points in the book in a touching way and made Luise even more understandable to me. Sanna-June Hyde was once again in the role she got to live. She knows how to embody firmness and softness at the same time. Rosa’s character in the book was more multidimensional and rebellious, but many events related to her had been left out of the play version.
It was interesting to see how well the characters resembled those I had imagined while reading the book. Martin Bahne, who plays Vilja’s father, Markus, was an exception. I had imagined Markus to be a beige-grey-pomarfin journalist and Markus, played by Martin Bahne, was sleek and colourfully dressed. When you compared her to the other men at the New Year’s party in the play, it was no wonder that Margot fell in love. Markus remains a supporting character, though, as You, Margot is a play with strong female roles.
The other actors also did a strong job, many even in several roles. The participants were Sanna Majuri, Vuokko Hovatta, Samuli Pajunen, Helena Haaranen, Risto Kaskilahti, Tuukka Leppänen, Lasse Lipponen, Emma Pälsynaho and Raili Raitala.
Praise for once
Yours, Margot was a fantastic show. It had found the essential core of a strong story, and the presentation enriched and deepened the reading experience of the book. At the premiere, the play already felt ready, there was peace on stage. I got the feeling that the working group had been working towards the same goal under the guidance of Riikka Oksanen’s magic guidance and the pieces have fallen into just the right places.
So that I wouldn’t be completely toothless in my praise, one thing struck me. It is “springen Sie jetzt NACH Hause”, not zu Hause.
The review can be found here.