Theater Review | This novelty drama is a wonderful surprise: full of accurate observations about relationships and love

Drama. A time of joy. Finland’s standard performance on the small stage of the Helsinki City Theater on September 5, 2024. Finnish translation of Arne Lygre’s play by Ari-Pekka Lahti. Directed by Tatu Hämäläinen. ★★★★★

Quite like being somewhere in continental Europe. Even after the show, at half past ten in the evening, it is +20 degrees in Hakaniemi.

The warmth at this time of the year feels wrong – unlike the kind of European feeling that Thursday’s premiere at the Helsinki City Theater radiated around. A Norwegian got his Finnish national performance Arne Lygren A time of joy (Tid for glede) and oh what a joy it was.

The show, which premiered in Norway in 2022, was a critical and audience success, and the text and staging were highly praised. The same can now be done in Finland.

Ilo ajan has been directed by someone who studied in Sweden and mostly worked there and in Norway Tatu Hämäläinen. It is not my intention to connect the feeling of Europeanness to this fact, let alone to the fact that the visual appearance of the show was made by a Norwegian Chrisander Brun. Characterization works or doesn’t work in completely different Finland vs. other national matches.

Of course, it is noteworthy that A time of joy Finnish translation and performance have been supported through the Finnish Cultural Foundation’s World Stage project. He has done an excellent Finnish translation Ari-Pekka Lahti.

We really need such fresh worlds in these times.

The play in the center is Aksle, he is the unifying factor in the show, which is divided into two clear parts. In the first part, he meets his mother after a long time (Heidi Herala) and his sister (Mitra Matouf) – but only to say that he was leaving and leaving everything behind.

Akslea is acting Rasmus Slätiswhose fine role work has a kind of heavy calmness, hypnotism.

The family meets near the cemetery, a place where a few strangers also happen to be. This leads to discussions, opinions, conflicts, as is usual in life between people.

In the second part, the mother arrives to meet Aksle’s abandoned spouse, David. In the same way as in the first half, he ends up talking and partying with people who are already strangers to him.

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There is air, lightness, joy everywhere.

Arne Lygre (b. 1968) is respected in his home country both as a writer and a playwright, and his plays have been translated and performed in many different parts of the world. A time of joy the text is both tense in form and extremely natural in expression. People’s speech is like what you hear in everyday life, only a little more beautiful, funnier, more rhythmic.

In addition to Herala, Matoufi and Slätis, all the other five actors play their roles with just the right intensity. Not over, not under.

Together with director Hämäläinen Maria Saivosalmen The choreography planned with is an important part of the expression, but in such a way that in the spoken parts the movement is as if glued to the lower surface of the text. If you closed your eyes, you wouldn’t know anything about the twists and turns with which the characters sometimes move.

There are sixteen roles for eight actors, which, with the above, may sound a bit difficult. But the structure of Lygre’s text, together with the fine acting work, makes it so that there is air, lightness, joy everywhere.

Joy and lightness do not mean lack of depth or seriousness. The text is full of precise observations about relationships between people and love. From all that need to belong and the desire to strive for distance, which is related to family relationships, pairings and friendships as well.

About contradictions that are part of life. Of words that can always be forgiven. About which one should be looked at in a human relationship: the end or the whole?

Lycra has written the play to be secondary, in a certain way mathematically precise, and has occasionally played with leaving its backbone exposed. At the beginning of the scenes, the characters introduce themselves, start their lines, like Heidi Herala’s mother right at the beginning: “Mother says: it’s wonderful here”.

The music for the show was composed by a singer and songwriter Islanderwho also performs music on stage. The music runs mainly in electronic tones and is seamlessly connected to Chrisander Bruni’s stage, lighting and costume design, which is, in one word, stunning. Simple, effective, beautiful. All in all and completely devoid of self-enhancement.

The fact that all the characters are dressed in identical clothes and similar platinum-blonde wigs seems justified and effective, but does not scream interpretation. The same applies to fluorescent tubes and their splashes of color, the spotlights that stand out graphically in their ladders, the back wall exposed in white, the color haze.

The mechanism feels the same as in a text with a lot of important, significant sentences and their connections to other sentences – but you don’t have to interpret anything by interpreting. There is permission to receive, to experience. To feel joy even if you don’t quite know why.

Mitra Matouf does a great job as a role, whose burst of laughter at the beginning has the same mild ambiguity as in other parts of the show. Picture: Katri Naukkarinen / Hkt

Set, lights and costumes Chrisander Brun, composition and music Islaja, sound design Eero Niemi, choreography and movement Maria Saivosalmi and Tatu Hämäläinen, disguise Jutta Kainulainen. Starring Rasmus Slätis, Heidi Herala, Mitra Matouf, Rauno Ahonen, Jouko Klemettilä, Vappu Nalbantoglu, Ursula Salo, Sauli Suonpää.