Horla

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

The name “Horla” derives from a French play on words: hors (“outside,” “beyond”) and là (“there”). It carries the meaning of someone excluded, set apart, or outside. It is someone alone in the middle of a storm—both physically and psychologically. Someone facing something immeasurably greater than themselves, over which they have no control.

“Horla” is a sequence of visual images in which people and storms, the sublime and the mundane, hope and despair, the attempt to understand and surrender to inevitability meet. At the heart of the production is the human relationship with a force that cannot be fully described or rationalised. For someone trying to describe a storm will always seem ridiculously small beside their words.

The storm approaches, the storm destroys; the storm chooses and distinguishes no one. 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 remaining option may be to accept their own smallness.

The production seeks a visual language for what resists words: how do you depict something that overwhelms a person and their ability to understand it? People try to make sense of catastrophe, measure it and bring order to it—to name the storm, calculate its strength, count its victims, draw up lists and find causes. “Horla” sets this rational effort against the storm itself: its sublimity, terror and untouchability. In this 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 design: Anne Türnpu

Co-production: Forecast Company, Eesti Noorsooteater, Tartu Uus Teater

Supported by: Tartu City, Eesti Kultuurkapital

Premiere: 16 January 2027

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