Review: Täti ja minä

VALKAMA AND KLEMETTILÄ AT THE GATES OF DEATH


Aunt and Me is a tragic story. The main roles are played by endless loneliness,
anxiety, death and, above all, the expectation of death. But when tragedy is
black enough, it turns into comedy.

Aunt and Me is the art of virtuoso actors. At Studio Elsa, we have
two virtuosos. During the entire performance, Ritva Valkama utters only a few
lines, but his facial expressions and gestures tell us things that words
they wouldn’t even be able to tell.

Jouko Klemettilä is a chatter waiting for his aunt’s death,
Judging by it, it’s been a horrible childhood. (“Dad knew when he was going to die, he
said, now I’m going to die, and shot herself,” “Mother always dressed me in girls’
clothes, she never forgave me for not being a girl.”)
Klemettilä asks her aunt how she would like her ashes to be stored. He
measures the aunt’s width and length to buy a chest of the right size, but
Winter turns into spring, spring into summer and autumn, but there is no
death.

The script for the play Aunty and Me forbids revealing the plot to future
viewers. Not revealed, although the story is a bit predictable.
However, let me tell you that Valkama is an old lady lying in bed. He is
more or less sick. Klemettilä is a nephew who has come to
To make a will.
Both the old woman Grace and the middle-aged man, Kemp, are infinitely
lonely people who have fallen out of their lives and have no one – except
each other, but they don’t notice that either, at least not Kemp.
Grace is silent so as not to reveal anything by talking, she does reveal
but Kemp is too full of himself and his speech to notice
anything. Kemp has probably never been allowed to talk as much as Grace’s
at the sickbed. He rewinds his miserable life without the “highlights”
any kind of sentimentality, externally just to fulfill
silence.
Klemettilän Kemp is like a durasel bunny at first, but the pace slows down. Just when
he senses a touch of love, it disappears…


Simplified hard
Beautiful theatre


The author of the play Aunt and Me is Canadian theatre man Morris
Panych. In the 1980s, he has made unfashionable
social cabarets and musicals, but they were successful.
Probably thanks to the macabre humor.
Morris Panych’s texts have been described as absurd, but Aunt Panych, for example,
And the self is no more absurd than human life in general.
Morris Panych has directed dozens of performances and acted in even more.
He hasn’t said no to TV roles either. For example, in Secret Folders
He has been seen, probably as some kind of freak.

My aunt and I are so exciting that I would like to see more
Morris Panych’s plays.
Panych makes simplistic, intensely beautiful theatre where humour is
black as night and which demands a lot from the actors. And the play doesn’t need
megalomaniac height. Two hours with intermissions is enough to tell
story “to the dead and to those who have not yet reached the
far,” as the author himself says.

Raila Leppäkoski has directed and translated the play Aunt and Me into Finnish. He is
clearly committed to it, and the result is in line with that. Excellent.