Strong troops have according to TT
Reached Thermopyle, Greece's lock
Forty-year-old Karin Boye
Wanted from Alingsås
The poem Dead Amazon by Hjalmar Gullberg has gone to history. However, Karin Boye's life partner Margot Hanel does not have something that the playwright Isabel Cruz Liljegren and the director Helena Sandström Cruz advise on. At the same time, they want to show a new page of Karin Boye, the poet who, on an unusually bitter April night in 1941, was found dead in a forest glade outside Alingsås after taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
Through equal sharing of research and imagination, they shed light on a human destiny that is hidden in the history books. Not much is preserved from the correspondence between Boye and the twelve-year-old Hanel - most letters were burnt to protect Boye's reputation. At Folkteatern, it is Boye's mother Signe (Lena B Nilsson) who gets dressed for this.
The playground is Karin's apartment in Stockholm , the apartment where Margot is allowed to live. The gray-painted walls are a good illustration of her interior landscape. External threats penetrate, memory fragments remind themselves through projections. Margot hears Karin's disappearance on the raspy radio.
The piece is structured as a decoder. Did Karin want to die? Or she left clues behind her to be saved this time, as so many times before. Karin Boye suffered from repeated depression. In Sara Turpin's figure, she also appears as a sensual woman who takes care of life and love. In the relationship with Margot, whom she met in Berlin where she was staying to cure her sexual orientation, she is the stronger one. She is bold and bold, but in her darkness lurks.
There is so much that is fine in the show ; the portrait of the two women fighting for a love that is not on equal terms, the purely bodily form of Margot's depression and the way she is denied and degraded.
It is a visual representation. Cleverly and ingeniously, Mats Sahlström's scenography acts as an open projection area for past experiences. The broadcasts from the raspy radio create time color.
The biggest problem with the show is that everything has already happened. We know how the story ends. The play thus becomes a descent into Margot's psyche, a kind of dream play into memories and fragments, an attempt to answer the question why?
As a performance, I feel that it stands still - which of course can be a point in itself. The grief has so many stages, and it is a fire test for Maria Zakrisson Mortensson to descend into the endless bottomless darkness, which causes her to screw on the gas stove. There is a lot that is nice at Folkteatern, but down there I do not follow her.