We are in the raw scene of Galeas and in a bloody Iraq, at the Finnish Migration Agency, at the psychiatrist and at a newly opened kebab restaurant. When the seventeen short stories in Hassan Blasim's acclaimed collection of Iraqi Christ take on a scenic life, playwright Lucas Svensson has pieced together his equally surreal and brutal stories into a flow. Here, on a foggy and dimly lit scene, suicide bombings, torture and brutal rape occur in parallel with a kind of everyday life, where hope and macabre humor live despite the most terrible hardships.
The stage floor, a mosaic of shattered glass shards , is a representation of the Sufisian 12th-century poet Rumi's sentence that “the truth is like a large mirror that has fallen from the sky, broken and broken into a thousand pieces. Everyone owns a tiny part of it, but everyone thinks their piece is the whole mirror ”.
Svensson's dramatization helps to create the entirety of the mirror pieces through connections between Hasim's characters. The result, in Natalie Ringler's exceptionally skilled direction, becomes a disgusting mosaic of the horrors of war and flight, convincingly played by the ensemble's nine actors. With Kardo Mirza as the author's mentally unstable alter ego at the forefront, they exchange lightning speed expressions of confident jihadists, kidnappers, ISIS fighters, migration officers, and tuneful Jehovah's Witnesses. For Finnish disco and oriental sounds, we can meet the ambulance driver who becomes a movie star in the terror groups' liquidation films, the boy who is believed to have put a little brother in the latrine and punished with the feces of his mother and Hassan himself, who is haunted by wolves at home.
This highlights the power of the story and the fine boundary between fairy tale and fiction, here the physical and animalistic points are emphasized. Bloodthirsty dogs with panting tongues, red cabbage heads that splash across the room after being put on the scaffold.
Once war-torn always war-torn. The cleaning worker Salim Abd al-Husayn alias Carlos Fuentes (Otto Hargne) tries to escape his Arab origins, but is chased by the destruction of his own nightmares. The stroboscope light pulses and tears everything apart. In the end, we all turn into howling dogs.
The show is canceled until March 22 because of the coronavirus. The ambition is to continue playing as soon as the situation allows.