Karula community turns local stories into a successful play

ERR’s review examines Karula Theatre’s “Lell”, a successful open-air production created by local amateurs in the Võru language. The play premiered on June 4, 2025, in Karula National Park, and all performances had sold out by the premiere.

The production was directed by Agu Trolla, with a script by Jan Rahman, set design by Jane Remm, costumes by Päikeriin Salm and musical design by Meelika Hainsoo. Paula Solvak served as the hiking guide. The musicians were Lee Õunapuu, Loo Kuks and Rolf Saarna, and the cast included Uku Freiberg, Jaanus Kala, Kaspar Kurve, Mihkel Nummert, Paula Solvak, Kadri Janson, Liisa Sachris and Viljar Kavant.

It is worth writing at length about a production made by amateurs, even when it is performed in a Võru-language dialect that is difficult for most Estonians to understand, the review says. The production succeeds without any concessions. It also raises questions about how a popular community-theatre production differs from a popular professional production, and what place amateur, biographical and community theatre have in Estonia’s theatrical landscape.

Theatre is an ephemeral art form, but beyond the immediate experience it also lives on in the audience’s memories and thoughts. By creating personal meanings, it can develop into a broader generalisation.

While the Soviet era awarded actors and directors the state title of People’s Artist, amateur theatre is a spontaneous phenomenon born from the love of theatre among people who work in other professions in their daily lives. Professional theatres may draw on the dramatic literature of the entire world. In community theatre, however, local people stage stories from their own community.

This can happen in the countryside as well as in cities. For example, residents of Nõmme could create stories based on the lives of well-known people from Nõmme. Community-theatre stories always have a strong second layer: a part of the shared life of the people that touches local audiences most deeply.

Few stories, however, can speak painfully to the largest possible community: the entire Estonian nation. The Karula-Ahijärve community achieved this with its major “haymaking”, the summer open-air production “Lell”, staged in 2025. It is not easy to bring together 40 people who voluntarily set aside their everyday work for an extended period to make theatre, including preparation over three consecutive summers.

“Good material is a prerequisite for a good production,” the reviewer recalls theatre-school teacher Mikk Mikiver saying.

There was enough material for the play, both written and drawn from oral tradition. Kaido Kama, who moved to the area around Ahijärve decades ago, collected stories about the local people. They spoke to him, a “new settler”, so strongly that he passed them on to Jan Rahman and encouraged him to write a play.

Without Kama, who also drew direct inspiration from conversations with the legendary forest brother Alfred Käärmann after Käärmann returned from a prison camp, the play would not have been written. Rahman used those stories and Käärmann’s memories to create the script and submitted it to a playwriting competition in 2011. It shared second place with Donald Tomberg’s “Data on Liina Pihlapuu”. The play then remained on the shelf, waiting for its time, until it was finally brought to life.

One feature of classical tragedy is that the audience knows from the beginning that the story will end badly. The same is true of “Lell”. The performance site, the ruins of Plaagi farm, leaves no room for doubt.

In one sentence, the play can be summed up as the story of Kalev, a young man raised on a large farm in the forests of southern Estonia. He hides in the forest from Soviet rule and eventually kills his uncle, Jüri.