Mr Vertigo (review)

The Finnish director Kristian Smeds's theatre has been synonymous with conceptual and aesthetic unpredictability, a postdramatic mise en scène suspending the boundary between the onstage and the offstage; for his distinctive work he received the XII Europe Prize New Theatrical Realities in April 2011. Smeds critically extended this exploration with Mr Vertigo—an adaptation of Paul Auster's 1994 novel—at the Finnish National Theatre. In the novel, Master Yehudi, a powerful magician, takes an orphan boy, Walt, into his tutelage. Recognizing the orphan's innate ability to fly, the Master's brutal instruction transforms him into Walt the Wonder Boy, marvelous centerpiece of a vaudeville show touring towns small and large across 1920s America. Adapting this narrative to the stage, Smeds's production interrogated the illusions and realities of theatre, dreams fulfilled and unfulfilled, blending the worlds of characters, actors, and spectators.

Onstage, magic, showmanship, realized and broken dreams sustained Master Yehudi's (Jukka-Pekka Palo) carnivalesque family, which shapes the talents of the orphan "pus-brained ragamuffin" Walt (Tero Jartti) to its own purposes. Much as Yehudi operates on Walt's aspirations to fly, Smeds worked on our longing for illusion, dialectically satisfying and frustrating our desire to be manipulated by his artistic magic. Smeds limited the 700-seat capacity of the main auditorium to 200 spectators, in the first half

Walt, in his Wonder Boy costume, walks on water in Master Yehudi's magic show. Tero Jartti (Walt) in Mr Vertigo. (Photo: Antti Ahonen.)

Kristian Smeds's theatre of magic imagery: Walt, levitating above the Finnish National Theatre main auditorium, disappears into the light. Tero Jartti (Walt) in Mr Vertigo. (Photo: Ville Hyvönen.)

seated on bleacher-like benches set on the stage's turntable. The audience revolved, vertiginously, observing scenes around the exposed, partially decorated stage walls. On occasion the curtain opened, sometimes on the abyss of the empty auditorium, sometimes to surprise us with magical effects. At one point, we heard music from Twin Peaks and the entire empty auditorium we stared into began to sway; suddenly, it seemed to shatter, flying apart like glass. The effects of lighting (Pietu Pietiäinen), visual and acoustic (Ville Hyvönen), and scenic (Kati Lukka) design were intense; Smeds's artistic team materialized illusions that few spectators will ever experience again, often disrupting or dissolving them just before we could fully consume them. Like Master Yehudi, Smeds used the disposition of the theatre to arouse, frustrate, and channel our desires. After a long, suspenseful intermission, the audience was abandoned in the plush but ghostly auditorium; it was a pleasure to be invited back onto the stage.

Smeds's mise en scène interwove scenes of marvelous transformation with critical reference to the materiality of the theatre itself. Once seated on the turntable, our layering into the magic show had already begun. Master Yehudi entered, ordering us to silence our cell-phones and commanding the lights to be lowered; we shared a prolonged moment of darkness and silence. Then a low rumble vibrated through us as the turntable began to turn. As in a fairytale, we revolved three times while an excellent jazz trio onstage (Verneri Pohjola, Aki Rissanen, Joonas Riippa) played curious music and the stagehands lit candelabras, illuminating the backstage playing areas that were arrayed like stations of the cross: a shabby theatre dressing room; a dark recess with a mysterious figure in a white boxing robe, an oversized W taped to his back; a stage dungeon with a corseted dominatrix. A series of imagistic vignettes staged the horrific emotional and physical means Master Yehudi used to discipline Walt's appropriated dreams of flight. At one point, his journey recalled a baroque processional as a Christ-like Walt bore a yoke and water buckets, moving forward as the audience rotated with him, part of the procession. He climbed the bleachers to his own Golgotha...