Review: Missä kuljimme kerran

Helsinki, my old darling

At first, the stage is black and white and almost deserted. White walls and canvases descend from the ceiling as a background for people and scenes, just like in a photographer’s studio. Short scenes are sometimes placed on each side of the stage; There is only a name.

People meet for a moment, run to the side, or leave into the background. At the back of the stage there are café tables, where they settle motionless, like the pages of an album, only to rise again in front of the viewer’s eyes.

Time changes, a civil war is fought, young people are frantically striving for a new world to which fathers have no access, revenge lives and the Lapua movement rises, football is thrown far, and the same iron bed moves on to more and more scenes.

There is an awful lot of empty space between the actors. Who are they, after all, and what do they aim for in life?


Directed by Kari Heiskanen, Kjell Westö’sWhere We Walked Once Upon a Time has moved to the City Theatre’s big stage. Beforehand, there was reason to be nervous about how a story with so few lines would become a drama. Yes, it does, and the result is a story that holds its grip even tighter towards the end, offering stunningly beautiful stage images. It gets under your skin and gets a lump in your throat: I’ve lived it before, and it’s never been easy.

There they are: the skilled but weak photographer Eccu Widing (Eero Aho), the strong Lucie Lilliehjelm (Vuokko Hovatta), who believes in the value of the human being, Ivar Grandell (Pekka Valkeejärvi), who believes in the value of the human being, and Allu Kajander (Niko Saarela), who grows into a man in a tough school, not to mention the others.

It may be that a viewer who has not read the book will initially think about the gallery of characters and historical events – it helps if you read the meritorious script well, preferably in advance. But at the latest, the faces of the photographs on the screen from past years and the wistfully sweet music tune the mind to the same frequency as Westö’s book.

The protagonist is a city where generation after generation hopes, makes mistakes, pursues happiness and is disappointed, finds themselves and stumbles over their weakness, lives their time and disappears. A person’s memory may remain on the page of a photo album for a while. Then the picture may end up on the shelf of the City Museum and, as it does now, it will be given a new life in a photo exhibition in the theatre’s lobby.

Towards the end of the play, Grandell, who has been crushed by life, sums up what it is all about to her beloved Henriette (Leena Rapola), who has returned disappointed from Stockholm. In the words of the book: “In every single place where a person has walked, there is a memory of him. That is why heat sometimes rises from the streets as we walk along them. That’s how we remember all the people who have walked there, loved and hated and hoped and suffered. Remember that Henriette, please: as long as someone knows that we have walked here, and as long as someone remembers us fondly, the streets will bear our name.”
Thank you.