Tragedy through the eyes of children
Lauri Maijala’s two-year period as a director at the Helsinki City Theatre will end on a small stage – the same one in which Maijala decided to become a theatre maker at the age of six.
I’ve been a regular customer of the Helsinki City Theatre since 1992, when I saw the musical Reearuu on a small stage. At the time, I was a six-year-old boy who, after seeing the performance, decided to abandon his seriously planned career as a police officer and become a theatre worker at all costs.
Reearuu tells the story of a little boy named Ruu who loses his entire family in a car accident. Ruu becomes an orphan boy wandering alone in the world, who at the end of the play lets the memory of his sister Reea in the form of an angel on the clouds to the mother and father angels.
Reearuu left a mark on little Lauri, who didn’t understand anything about death and loss at the time, and he has burned on my skin like a tattoo.
A fairy tale becomes a reality
For me, the theatre became a meeting place for living people, where the audience can experience things in advance that they would never want to encounter. Witnessing a skilfully executed tragedy in the theatre is a great privilege, and at its best, through the passionately dedicated theatre makers, the mirror in front of us turns into tears in the corners of our eyes that we did not know we needed. Theatre can prepare for the inevitable or act as a medicine to treat a wound that has already been received.
Author Anneli Kanto has been an important working partner for me since KOM Theatre’s Blood Roses (2018). Red Orphans , written by Anneli Kanto and adapted and directed by me from this material, deals with orphanhood in the same way as Reearuu . Now, however, the fairy tale has become a reality. The Red Orphans is not just a private tragedy, but the catalyst for the chain of action is the darkest period in Finnish history, the Civil War of 1918. It divided our nation in two with such terrible force that we still have to erase its traces. The war itself was horrible, but its consequences could have been even more horrific for those who survived. And as usual, the children suffered the hardest fate.
Red Orphans tells the miserable fate of the Johansson family from the point of view of orphaned children. Although it is based on unspoken factual state miscalculations and even unambiguous injustices, Red Orphans is not primarily a historical but an emotional historical performance. It brings us to a world where things do not appear as they may have actually happened, but as they felt to the children.
Theatre creates hope
The play does not offer the viewer an easy solution, and sometimes there are no satisfactory solutions that bring a liberating catharsis. But as long as there is love, even trampled down, there is a chance of salvation. The road to the inexorable victory of love sometimes goes through hell, but that is the path we must take. We who now live in abundance owe it to those who were abandoned and who were eventually forgotten as numbers in the statistics.
I am sure that Reearuu will also be present in this last performance so far in this theatre and on this stage that has become so dear.
Let all the layers of time be present in the audience, past and future, childhood and innocence, adulthood and forgiveness. Theatre is a safe place to feel and be impressed. As long as a person feels empathy, there is hope for humanity. And, to quote Nâzim Hikmet , it cannot live without hope.
Text Lauri Maijala