Horla

Lightning flashes. The mind counts the seconds between the flash and the rumble. The production joined the repertory through the 2026/2027 open call and is co-produced by Tartu Uus Teater, Forecast Company and Eesti Noorsooteater.

The name “Horla” comes from a French wordplay on hors (“outside,” “beyond”) and là (“there”), and conveys the meaning of someone excluded, marginalised, or beyond. It is someone alone in the middle of a storm—at once on a physical and psychological scale. Someone facing something immeasurably greater than themselves, over which they have no control.

“Horla” is a sequence of visual images in which a person meets a storm, the sublime meets the vulgar, hope meets despair, and the attempt to understand meets surrender to inevitability. At the heart of the production is humanity’s relationship with a force that cannot be fully described or rationalised. For a person trying to describe a storm will always seem laughably small beside their words.

The storm approaches, the storm destroys; the storm makes no choices and draws no distinctions. Its predictability and, at the same time, its complete unpredictability—its justice or injustice—remain incomprehensible to people. The storm does not hate, despise, or love—it simply is. Faced with such a force, a person’s last resort may be to accept their own smallness.

The production seeks a visual language for what words resist: how do you depict something that overwhelms a person and their ability to understand it? People try to make sense of, measure, and organise catastrophe—to give the storm a name, calculate its strength, count its victims, draw up lists, and find reasons. “Horla” sets this rational endeavour alongside the storm itself: its sublimity, terror, and untouchability. In this field of tension, the last desperate flash of hope meets complete surrender. The production observes a person at the moment when familiar explanations no longer apply and all that remains is their presence before something indescribably vast.

On stage: Johanna Vaiksoo
Director and designer: Joel Väli
Dramaturg: Andreas Kübar
Costume designer: Lisette Sivard
Lighting designer: Leon Allik
Sound designer: Lauri Lest
Voice designer: Anne Türnpu

Co-produced by: Forecast Company, Eesti Noorsooteater, Tartu Uus Teater
Supported by: City of Tartu, Eesti Kultuurkapital
Premiere: 16 January 2027
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