Review: Yökyöpelit

Poetic and crazy fun

Laura Ruohonen’s Night Owls is a hit with children

Helsinki City Theatre’s children’s performance Night Owls is based on Laura Ruohonen’s children’s nursery rhymes Allakka pullakka and Yököpelit. Ruohonen’s books have their rightful place on the children’s bookshelves of the 2000s, next to the poems of Kari Hotakainen, Jukka Virtanen andJuice Leskinen , to the right of Kirsi Kunnanen , inherited from her grandmother. The flight of imagination, playing with words and dizzying associations, these are what the best children’s books are made of.

The same ingredients create the most successful children’s theatre performances. The Helsinki City Theatre does not skimp on offering the very best to the little spectators. Laura Ruohonen’s own direction, Anna-Mari Kähärä’s music, the visual design of the distinguished illustrator Erika Kallasmaa and the musical theatre expertise of the performers guarantee an amazing theatrical experience. Perhaps it is thanks to Ruohonen’s notoriously strict attitude that not even the smallest detail has been compromised: set design, costumes, props, lights, sounds… Everything is polished to the last detail and of high quality.

The end result is not traditional children’s or musical theatre. The Night Owls is a fairy tale that follows the logic of poetry and dream, full of working paradoxes. The performance manages to be retro and full of contemporary theatre at the same time. The stage design is both rich and stripped-down, the dialogue poetic and hilarious. The actors’ expression is stylized but recognizable. The plot, which strays off the beaten track, does not lose the common thread, but always cunningly returns to the basic problem: who is gnawing at it in the night, who ate the agent’s car and head lice Väätäinen’s home beanie?

Laura Ruohonen’s attitude towards children’s theatre seems to be absolutely right. The little viewer is respected but not flattered, and the child’s intellect and ability for linguistic and visual associations are not underestimated for a moment. Still, all the pseudo-artistic exaggeration is conspicuous by its absence. The show has its feet on the ground and its head in the galactic spheres. On top of everything else, Night Owls is downright lavishly rich in form, means and content. And yes, it’s true that there is too much of everything – wonderful!

The performance lasts just over a couple of hours, but you can’t feel it anywhere. Fifteen years from now, the same kids will be enchanted by Uncle Smeds’ six-hour spectacles, I guess. And nothing less is enough for a viewer who has heard Vuokko Hovatta’s enchanting singing, admired Martti Suosalo’s expressive physique, been delighted by Katja Kortström’s aerial acrobatics and tasted Seppo Halttunen’s verbal mastery. In addition, the adaptable Emilia Nyman and Tuukka Leppänen and the funny Seela Sella. I also have to mention the band (Marko Puro, Sara Puljula and Sami Kurppa) who play and sing unbelievably well.

Some boring adult might complain a little that the songs are mixed in places so that you can’t make out the lyrics. But a boring adult has himself to blame if he didn’t know the poems by heart beforehand. Once you know how to do it, even Jaakko Vaakko Water Rat.