Review: Jumala on kauneus
Theatre review: A fierce dozen are raging in Studio Pasila
When I watched the rush after the initial silence of Kristian Smeds’ direction of God is Beauty, it occurred to me that I would surely look at this physical revelry of the deceased Jouko Turkka with a wide grin, as the classic smile was not really part of his facial expressions. At the start of Studio Pasila’s performance, there is rope jumping with a group familiar from old yard games (and the playground equipment is not a string but a thick rope that requires strength to spin), there is boy wrestling with a bare upper body, there is violently splashing painting work on wet sheets, there is noise and uncontrolled rushing. Everything breathtaking.
The energetic group of 12 Theatre Academy students seems to take the warm-ups on stage, and the action never slows down, as the bull run at the end of the two-and-a-half-hour performance still raises their legs in an exemplary manner.
That bull scene, on the other hand, closes the Smeds-Turkka circle that has settled in my mind: Hiidenkivi, Viertolan härät… what would Seven Brothers look like under the direction of Smeds?
Far from what it looks like emergency relief work
The play God is Beauty, which revolves around the life and art of the artistically, socially and politically at least “challenging” painter Vilho Lampi in the 1920s and 30s, is loosely based on Paavo Rintala’s novel of the same name (1959). Rintala’s work actually raised Vilho Lampi (1898-1936) to national fame, even elevated it to a myth. The art of this began to be looked at with new eyes – with appreciation. Expressionism had not been particularly popular in the years after the “golden age of Finnish art”. Lampi’s political direction, IKL, experienced a counter-development in the axis of appreciation in the 1930s and 50s.
Kristian Smeds brought Lampi back into the limelight after directing a stage adaptation based on Rintala’s novel for Teatteri Takomo in 2000, which was one of his final breakthrough works. Smeds made a new version of it for the big stage of the Finnish National Theatre in 2008.
God is Beauty by Smeds gets its third coming as a kind of emergency patch. In the three-year project of the Helsinki City Theatre and the Theatre Academy of the University of Tade, third-year acting students work together to prepare a performance for HKT’s spring programme under the guidance of a professional director and with the technical and production support of the City Theatre. The first to be completed under the direction of Akse Pettersson was the Boccaccio classic Decamerone, which, however, was practically not performed to the public during last spring’s coronavirus lockdown.
When Leea Klemola had to withdraw from her responsibility for directing her new text at the last minute this spring, exhausted by an excessive workload, a replacement was found at the top level. Kristian Smeds chose an old acquaintance to work on, which was certainly wise considering the sudden alarm.
There is no nature of emergency relief work in Studio Pasila’s operation. Smeds has made acting students put everything on the line. After all, energetic is perhaps too plush a word to characterize this frenzy. Frenzy, explosive are closer to depict the events on stage.
There is room for that. Studio Pasila’s surprisingly spacious stage is practically empty, except for the band podium. At times, however, it is filled with the consequences of Lampi’s frenzy, i.e. the search for beauty. An artist beheads about twenty heads of cabbage with a baseball bat, shatters an ice cube the size of a PC desktop computer, and chops two-metre-long logs into chips with a knife.
For Vilho Lampi, beauty really was divinity. Extreme measures had to be taken in pursuit of it. In other words, as he himself says on stage: “The crazy thing about art is that you don’t give up. You try to get to the core, even if the vomit flies out of your mouth – and your ass.”
To her child models, she says, as they murmur that their small surface defects are visible in the painting, that “in the land of beauty, even scabs are beautiful”.
When Lampi gets to see the treasures of the Louvre’s Dutch art department on his trip to Paris, there is no limit to that fascination. The Stendhal syndrome (physical symptoms caused by a strong art experience) in the scene of this episode on the Pasila stage is almost like death throes.
The actual death convulsions are promised later in the performance, even on a mass scale and incorrectly comedic, so the viewer has to wonder if they dare to laugh at that point. Most of the people at the premiere dared.
In rapids and backwaters
The great, essential difference between Smeds’ direction and Turkic physicalism is that instead of overwhelming anxiety, this wild dozen makes you go to bed with freedom and joy. If at times it seems that young men and women are pushing themselves to the limit, they seem to be doing it like wild children, of their own volition.
The large group works as a collective, sometimes disciplined, sometimes undisciplined. The performance’s choreographer Antti Lahti’s handprint is often visible, even though a lot of the work is done with his own steps.
The whole group of performers is together vilholampi. They are also all people from Liminka, or tar bourgeois from Oulu, or art police from Helsinki, or wise critics. The circle of life that both fed Lampe mentally and distressed him to the point of self-destruction.
Smeds also shows that he has mastered intervals, as the performance is not one never-ending honk. In moments of stagnation, both the performers and their audience can sigh, and it is needed by everyone. At times, the band – consisting of the same acting students, of course – plays slower music. Most of the time, however, they do go for it in boomer language, expressing themselves “on the basis of a pound”.
Those who go to see the biographical drama of the artist, who was left unappreciated during his lifetime, will probably be disappointed, but who would expect that from Smeds? God is Beauty may not offer such surprises or mind-wrenching visionary as his The Unknown Soldier, Mr Vertigo or Taboo for the National Theatre, for example, but such a part is not needed now. The joy of doing, being on stage, conveying the artist’s ecstasy and aggression – that is the main role in this implementation of God is Beauty. The frenzy.