Horla

Lightning flashes. The mind counts the seconds between the flash and the rumble. The production joined 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” comes from a French play on the words hors (“outside”, “beyond”) and là (“there”), and carries the meaning of someone excluded, left aside, or on the 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 human beings and the storm, the sublime and the banal, 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 a person trying to describe a storm will always seem ridiculously small beside their words.

The storm approaches, the storm destroys; the storm does not choose or distinguish. Its predictability and, at the same time, utter unpredictability—its fairness or unfairness—remain incomprehensible to people. The storm does not hate, despise or love—it simply is. Faced with such a force, a person’s last option may be to accept their own smallness.

The production seeks a visual language for what words resist: how can we depict something that overwhelms a person and their ability to understand it? People try to make sense of catastrophe, measure it and put it in order—to give the storm a name, calculate its strength, count its victims, make lists and find reasons. “Horla” sets this rational effort alongside the storm itself: its sublimity, terror and untouchability. In this tension, a final 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 set 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
Supporters: Tartu City, Eesti Kultuurkapital
Premiere: 16 January 2027
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