| Review by Martti K. Mäkelä for kulttuuri.tv LA CHUTE DE LA MAISON USHER Decadent enchantment in Kiasma The American Edgar Allan Poe is undoubtedly one of the 1800ies most important authors, since he in his own style of romantic horror created an entire new genre. In the form of short stories, poems and films, his intoxicated visions of dismay have lived until this day (for example The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Crow etc.) Even cheap pocket versions are found in most people’s bookshelves today. I myself remember having seen in television, far too young at the time, the 60ies Hammer-production of The Fall of the House of Usher, and the dying screams of the maiden, mistakenly buried alive in the cellars of the old mansion, are still imprinted on my mind. The Fall of the House of Usher is one of Poe’s most poetic and disconsolate stories. Claude Debussy was attracted to the tale of isolation and degeneration and tackled the material after his own illness burdened him. A dark and unfinished outline of an opera was left behind that cast a tragic shadow over the end of the career of this impressionist who worshipped beauty. In the program note there is a quotation of thoughts during the end of his life. Disappointed in life and people he sympathised strongly with the characters of Usher. Although the material in question consists of only fragments, there have been several attempts at reconstructing through recordings and even concerts. Niina Tamminiemi has gathered to the Kiasma Theatre an ambitious group that builds its own artistic entirety out the elements of Poe’s texts, Debussy’s music completed with a wild modern sound-scape, visual art, choreography and almost acrobatic singers. The program note also points out that this is a work of its own, not a completion of Debussy’s material. The world of the Ushers The story is situated in Usher’s a Poe-like decayed mansion, which seems to be surrounded with by an atmosphere of gloom. The storyteller (Juha Ahonen) has received a confusing message from his friend Roderick Usher (Atlan Karp), who lives together with his twin sister Madeline (Niina Victoria) both their family’s last surviving members. As he arrives he is told by the family doctor (Juha Karvonen) of the terrifying fate of this degenerate inbred family’s torturous wasting away. The dead mother’s black figure wanders around the wings ominously. And faithful to the style, the storyteller is absorbed by the situation and sits down to make notes, and to smoke some opium. To one of the essential themes arise Madeline’s muteness due to the terrible family secret and Roderick’s schizophrenic listening to his sister’s haunting voices in the corridors of the old house. After the death of the sister, she is put inside a tomb in the catacombs underneath the house. However, the twins do not remain separate for long. Soon the sister, buried alive returns to claim her brother’s life as the entire disintegrating house sinks into the muddy lake. Wrapped virtuosos Tomi Paasonen’s direction focuses on Roderick’s and Madeline’s strange relationship. The twins’ life is described through surrealistic visions that alter between the womb, the childhood frolics and power games. Hate and love inevitably suffocate these two orphans that cannot escape each other. The presence of incest only increases the peculiar atmosphere. Karp and Victoria deliver heart-rending performances, struggling in plastic wrap and playing in ropes hanging from the ceiling. Clear voices sound marvellous, achieving both tragedy and comedy. The interpretation of Debussy’s melancholy music of the trio (flute, piano and cello) held me spellbound. Quite a horrifying scene was as Madeline wraps his brother’s head into plastic suffocating him for several seconds. Karp’s voice, liberated from the vacuum, sounds as if nothing had happened. The most comical moments where in a scene where Roderick forces Madeline to sing the beautiful poem from the beginning of the piece. Never satisfied he starts to drill his sister like the best caricature of a singing teacher. And the most poetic vision of their relationship is saved for the end. The storyteller Juha Ahonen isn’t saved from difficult tasks either. At times he has to speak while drawing air inwards. Watching it one’s throat started getting dry. And Juha Karvonen ads his nuance to the piece with his doctor characterisation that brings Mengele to mind, routinely injecting and examining his fading patients. The enchantment and horror of vision and sound What made this performance especially interesting was the its visual language together with a sound tapestry. The set material being translucent sheets of plastic made it oddly multifaceted, at times reflecting stars and birds, at times creating extremely claustrophobic and suffocating vacuums of degeneration. Images created by terrific interplay of light and shadows, interchanged on the surface of plastic from beauty to terror. Especially pressuring was the moment as the doctor shrouds Madeline’s corpse into a thick garbage bag. The burial had a sense of clinical contemporary death. The red ropes, like blood veins, hanging from the ceiling function as pedestals for unstable players, as support threads for the wasting dependent twins in a marionette theatre. Johannes Raumonen, also responsible for the dramaturgy, created a sound-scape that really hit me hard. Thrilling wormholes and the hollow resonance of grave tombs supported the hopeless and haunting images. Also the echoed and effected voices created strong discharges of emotion. Maybe the only problem of this ambitious work was the shaking of the text machine above the stage. Can’t Kiasma find a tool to stabilise a projector! At times the ropes got tangled and the sound of the plastic took some attention, but these are small issues in comparison with the merits of the piece and the precise work of this team. The beautiful ending etched into my mind forever. This piece is definitively worth seeing, still next year in January. Review by Harri Kuusisaari in Rondo, magazine for classical music, 2-2003 The Glory of Decay All new attempts at producing chamber operas are delightful, and all directors and visual artists from outside the world of opera are welcome to bring fresh air into this form of art. Spinto is the name of the newest opera production company. At Kiasma Theatre it presented a new piece “The Fall of the House of Usher”, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story and the unfinished opera by Claude Debussy. Debussy left 28 minutes of fragmented materials behind, so it is not necessary to remain faithful to the composer. The opera, dramatised by Johannes Raumonen fuses the music with Poe’s texts, multimedia and physical theatre. Thus the piece also attracted a lot of audience that normally doesn’t come to see opera. The story is a combination of romantic horror and psychodrama, revelling in decay. In the House of Usher, everything seems to rot into ones hands. Its characters, tormented by incest struggle in the claws of their past. One can guess why Debussy left the gloomy subject. Tomi Paasonen is more known as a choreographer and The Fall of the House of Usher is his first opera direction. He has integrated to the singers’ expressions a comprehensive physicality. The singers, hanging in ropes, crawling on the floor and wrapping themselves into plastic film, found extreme psycho-physical states, that seldom is witnessed in operas over here. The producer of the production Niina Tamminiemi also sang the morbid soprano main role and other soloists include Juha Ahonen, Atlan Karp and Juha Karvonen. Debusssy’s music sounded lucid with the flute, piano and cello (Sami Junnonen, Kumi Komori and Heini Mielonen), and the visualisation by Jari Haanperä with its plastic, pile of brushwood and smoke was functioned as connective tissue in the piece. Review by Hannu-Ilari Lampila in Helsingin Sanomat, 10.12.02 Revelling with decay! Kiasma Theatre’s opera performance, based on Claude Debussy’s French opera fragments, gorges with decay and horror, to the point of amusement. It is based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, the master of morbid tales of horror. On the Kiasma stage we see a revolting plastic hell, which has sort of been smeared with blood and other purulent extracts. The main couple, the twins of Usher, Madeline and Roderick look like they are in a severe state of rotting and going to a vampire feast. With good will, one can see in The Fall of the House of Usher some kind of symbolism pointing to the state of society or the arts. Maybe the audience is offered a mirror, which shows how we are subjects of blood sucking in today’s capitalistic society. The poor twins can also be seen as victims of sadistic people and systems. In dream interpretations the house symbolises the body of a person its personality. Thus the demonic decaying mansion, depicts in first hand the twins’ incestuous relationship, destined for doom, their collapsing inner and outer state mauled by insanity and pain. Debussy completed 23 minutes of music to his opera outline. He left only one unbroken scene, the duet of the friend and the doctor. One notices immediately how he wanted to express extreme decadence and suffocating melancholy in his own style, discretely hinting, not painting crudely. The difference of the level between Debussy’s and Johannes Raumonen’s music is as big as expected, but all respect to the young composer’s attempts to walk in the footsteps of the genius of impressionism. The example teaches you to let go of pathos and to play with the small vibrations of feeling, light sounds and rhythms. However, in the hands of Raumonen, the expression of the voice from time to time gives in to the pressure of traditional operatic pathos, despite the fact that he also has parody in mind. On one hand a lot happens on stage, on the other not very much at all. The inventive director-choreographer Tomi Paasonen fills the stage with pseudo action, especially hanging and swinging in ropes. So we are marionettes, tortured and pained by higher powers of evil. The young singers do their best to express the horror cabinet characters’ crazy and dark movements of mind and body and sing so vigorously that I would grant them even “healthier” opera roles. The translucent flute-piano-cello combination is the link to the refined sound world of Debussy. |
| HOME STAGE VIDEO FOTO PRESS RESUME CONTACT |
