Review: Villisikaprinssi

A DEMANDING FAIRY TALE AS A CHILDREN’S THEATRE

With an innate royal posture, the Countess (Lilga Kovanko) steps onto the stage. The simple and tasteful décor by Katariina Kirjavainen highlights the Baroque era. On the other chair sits musician Elina Jukola, whose main instrument is the flute. And so begins the session of the fairy tale cabinet.

The story is about a prince who has been enchanted into a wild boar by an evil fairy. The story contains suspense, tragedy and a redemptive happy ending, as in all real fairy tales. However, The Countess’s Tale has a special moral, which is that you should not judge a dog by its hair – or a boar prince by its shape. When the skin falls off, a beautiful prince is revealed, who, of course, gets his princess, although the third in order. The other two meet tragic fates, but they don’t. The whole thing can also be successfully read by adults as a social satire, a popular literary form in the time of the countess, at the end of the 1600s.

Anneli Mäkelä’s attempt to tell a long story to today’s action-packed young children with words alone, easily illustrated with musical effects, is a bold venture. The Wild Boar Prince would have been excellent as a radio play, not least with Lilga Kovanko’s fine voice processing and flawless Finnish diction, for which she deserves extra praise. A certain premiere nervousness was expressed in some bars, which were not disturbing. Carrying almost an hour of dramatized monologue in a language that is not one’s own stage language is not easy. Elina Jukola’s musical accompaniment was discreet and compliant.

The audience, which apparently consisted mostly of kindergarten children with their aunts, was clearly unaccustomed to this type of event and perhaps a little too young for the long story. Four years is the absolute minimum to cope. Slightly older children will surely get more out of the story, which is told in the old-fashioned way without unnecessary props and artificial dramatization. Welcome – but demanding.