What happened to Lempi?
The year is 1944. As a result of a bet, Lempi falls in love with the young farmer Viljami and becomes pregnant. A war breaks out and Lempi stays in a remote village in Lapland with a maid girl named Elli. When Viljami returns home from the front, Lempi has disappeared. No one knows where and why.
Lempi, voiced by Krista Kosonen, is not seen in the play, but her life story unfolds based on the story of Viljami, Elli and Lemppi’s twin sister Sisko.
“This is a drama with a dense atmosphere, where three actors each take the story in their own direction. They remember and hear Lemppi in a very different way,” says Lemppi’s director Miika Muranen.
Throughout the performance, the viewer gets to ponder what Lemppi’s fate was. Who was he really? What happened to him? And can you ever see the other person completely.
LEMPI is based on Minna Rytisalo’s debut novel published in 2016. After reading the book, Muranen immediately thought that he would like to make a performance of it.
“Rytisalo’s language is exceptionally beautiful, the story is great and it has great people. Women are active actors and the image of men is exceptionally sensitive, which makes this work particularly interesting,” Muranen says.
She dramatised Lemppi together with Sinikka Sanelma and it premiered at the Rovaniemi Theatre in 2020. The performance was selected for the main programme of the Tampere Theatre Festival.
Muranen says that the best ideas have been taken from the Rovaniemi performance, but the Helsinki City Theatre’s Lempi is a work of its own.
“The fact that we get to create this performance in a completely new space with set designer and costume designer Reija Hirvikoski already makes this performance completely different from what it was in our first version. As a director, it’s a wonderful challenge to figure out how to get the whole audience at your fingertips with three actors and be able to tell the story in a way that the audience would be wonderfully in front.”
Muranen’s previous directorial, Agatha Christie’s suspense play Mousetrap , was performed on the Arena stage and the big stage in 2023–2024.
“It’s great to return to visit the Helsinki City Theatre again, as the resources here are good and the staff is incredibly motivated.”
THE Lapland War is strongly present in the play, but it is rather a circumstance and background. “Lempi is not a depiction of war, but it tells about people in an extreme situation, in the midst of love and passion,” Muranen says.
All the characters in Lemppi are looking for a love that they can’t get or that may not even be real.
“In almost every direction I direct, I deal with love in some way. Love is at the heart of drama because it involves big decisions, big deeds, big emotions and big conflicts. When two people fall in love, your heart breaks somewhere else,” Muranen says.
In addition to romantic love, Lempi deals with the love between twin sisters and the conflicts of sibling relationships. The power of fate is also one of the themes of the performance – how the stories of these people intersect and intertwine.
Both as a director and as an actor, Muranen loves great emotions on stage, and they will be in store in this performance. Even though Lempi is in the midst of various emotional storms, he believes that the viewer will not be exhausted under them, but will become empowered. In addition to acting, emotions are painted by music composed by sound designer Aleksi Saura for this performance.
“The roles of Lemppi are played by an amazing trio of actors, with Ursula Salo, Vappu Nalbantoglu and Sauli Suonpää taking on roles. I dare to promise brilliant acting, an addictive story and a surprising ending. When you leave the stands, you have experienced something big.”
Text: Ida Henritius