Theater Review | An ingenious play about transgenerational trauma gets an ambitious adaptation in the theater of Espoo

Drama

Anatomy of a Suicide. Finland's first performance at the Espoo theater on February 1. Production Teatteri Metamorfoosi together with Espoo theater and Circo Aereo. ★★★★

Skip the talk, rants, returning to the same vague pain and the same big question. How to survive a mother's suicide and how to stop the continuation of the trauma from generation to generation?

In such moods, one moves in a tough international situation By Alice Birch (e.g. Normal People – series arranger and Dead Ringers -series scriptwriter) in an ingenious play A suicide anatomy. It tells about transgenerational trauma.

The show at the Revontulihalli of Espoo theater (&) is a co-production with Teatteri Metamorfoos, which specializes in physical theater and masks, and the circus group Circo Aereo.

The result of long-thought-out cooperation has been born Davide Giovanzana and Sanna Salmenkallion directed performance that helps to face trauma with the help of different forms of theater.

The play is written as a score rather than a traditional play where things follow one another. There are three time levels on the stage, so that the scenes are shown at the same time and the viewer has to be attentive so as not to miss pieces.

One time plane is the 70s, where the suicidal Carol (Terhi Suorlahti) is expecting a child. The second time plane is that of his drug-addicted, adult daughter Anna (Rosa Söderholm) a story where everything has started to go wrong after the mother's suicide.

The third is the story of Anna's daughter Bonnie, which takes place in the near future, in the year 2030. Bonnie (Senna Vodzogbe) is determined to get rid of the trauma and wants to end the vicious cycle by sterilizing himself. An essential part is the people around them, through whom shades and pieces are constantly being added to the mosaic.

Something very familiar, actually a pretty flat way of life. And at the same time something very strange, out of place all the time. Air and oxygen, the variation of distance and closeness. And at the same time, the bottom mud of the mind that you can't get out of.

Mirkka Nyrhinen staging and Juho Rahijärvi the lights make the stage unusually installation-like through color codes and playfulness.

Object theater, masks, puppets and aerial acrobatics remind us that the different forms of theater basically mean more than tricks and craftsmanship.

The actors create the scenes and subsurface tensions well, but they handle the lines and the rhythmic elements written by the author in the text less well. The language often seems to hang a bit vaguely over the scenes.

When none of the time levels of the work is more present than the other, the tension is not really created by what happens next, but rather by the relationship I take with the things that are on the stage.

And that's where the theater stage beats a TV series or a movie 100-0.

Terhi Suorlahten Carol's character is the fractured core of the show. The character sneaks onto the stage and is at once nowhere and everywhere. In the end, not much is said about him, but I still feel that I am getting to know this particular person.

I understand him and his solutions, even if they are not explained. The ability of Suorlahti's character to be present and evade all obvious interpretations and at the same time offer so much information about his character seems almost unreal. Like a circus stunt, after which one can only gasp for breath.

All in all, there is a lot in the Espoo show that you would like to see more on the stages of big theaters. The ability of institutional theaters to keep their stages as open as possible for the collision of different genres is their future lifeblood.

Text by Alice Birch, direction by Davide Giovanzana and Sanna Silvennoinen, translation by Reita Lounatvuori, lighting by Juho Rahijärvi, set design and costumes by Mirkka Nyrhinen, puppeteer Elina Sarno, music by Maija Ruuskanen and Viljami Lehtonen. Actors Samuli Nordberg, Eero Ojala, Pauliina Palo, Riina Tikkanen, Roosa Söderholm, Terhi Suorlahti, Senna Vodzogbe.