"Make me a mountain, not one of those half-finished ones like God created because he only had six days." - From “Mr Puntila and his man Matti" by Brecht
Build Me a Mountain! is VERK´s second performance about people revolting against God because they want to define their own reality. The performance circles around the themes: How to relate to our own time and how to continue to live when all the illusions are gone.
Build Me a Mountain! is a story about two persons; the Finnish playwright and business-woman Hella Wuolijoki and the German playwright Bertolt Brecht and their creative encounter in Marlebäck in the Finnish countryside during the summer of 1940. Verk has found diaries, letters, stories and plays from that decisive period and will blend fictional scenes with documented material.
Build Me a Mountain! is also a story about exile and escapism. Maybe it was in protest or helplessness that they made an alternative reality in the Finnish countryside, as opposed to the harsh reality surrounding them: Europe was burning while they took refuge on an island of fiction, telling each other stories, discussing world peace and writing plays together. One main question they examined in different approaches was “the art of being human in an inhumane and complicated world.”
Brecht writes:
The play “Puntila” means hardly anything to me, the war everything, about Puntila I can write virtually anything, about the war nothing.
The theatre company VERK believes this extraordinary encounter has a story to tell us today.
Consept: Hyttinen / Hannestad / Mossling
Instruction: Fredrik Hannestad
Actors: Saila Hyttinen, Håkon Vassvik, Anders Mossling
Music/sound: Per Platou
Light design: Tilo Hahn
Scenographi: Signe Becker
Text and Dramaturgy: Daniel Wedel and VERK
Co-production: Black Box Teater and Baltic Circle Helsinki
Producer: Verk
Funded by: Arts Counsil Norway, Alfred Kordelinin Fonden in Finland, Finnish-Norwegian culture institute
Build Me a Mountain! had world premiere in Helsinki, Baltic Circle on 17. November 2011.