Review: Isät ja pojat
BEAUTIFUL AND CLASSIC
In his novel Fathers and Sons, Turgenev speaks of time as a flying bird or a crawling caterpillar and states that a person is especially good when he does not notice whether time is going fast or slow.
In the hands of the Irish playwright, Brian Friel, Turgenev’s novel has been turned into a play with rare success. This is partly due to the nature of the novel itself.
Although it tells a broad and atmospheric story, it nevertheless depicts a specific turning point in a limited period of time within the framework of a clearly definable plot in the lives of its central characters.
Kari Heiskanen The performance, directed by the Helsinki City Theatre for the main stage, proceeds with enjoyable ease and beautifully builds the dimension of both time and space into the story with stage technology.
The people walking on the revolving stage travel through time, and the depth and breadth of the wide stage offer well-utilised opportunities to create overlapping, parallel and constantly moving images that densify the narrative.
However, something funny has happened when the play has been translated from English instead of Russian.
All people, regardless of their position, address each other, which feels strange, because at the same time they are well aware of hierarchies – and their future breakdown.
We are living in a time when major social changes are coming, new radical ideas are starting to break through. That is why it seems strange that forms of address equate what inequality is thematically important.
Romanticism in focus
Turgenev’s fathers are liberal humanists of the older generation, the nobleman Nikolai Petrovich (Kari Heiskanen) and the country doctor Vasily Ivanovich (Seppo Maijala). The boys are radical young students who have declared themselves nihilists. The story is about the difference and encounter between generations. Still, romance and love take center stage.
The stage design created by Hannu Lindholm’s classic white façade columns and light birch trunks is airy, spacious and exudes nostalgia for the past but also a sense of security. Mika Ijäs’s lighting design tones the atmosphere mostly into a glowing, warm summer day, but also highlights the shadows and dramatic moments.
The young lions, Arkady Nikolaevich (Sami Hokkanen) and Evgeni Vasilyevich (Kari-Pekka Toivonen), who are determined to change the world, meet not only their father, but also several beautiful women. They date, fall in love, and before anything changes in the world, a leaf turns in the lives of both young men.
Toivonen and Hokkanen are brave young heroes. Both rarely succeed in maintaining a romantic grandeur that is difficult to reach in modern times. Minna Suuronen and Merja Pietilä play their strong lovers, Suuronen in a subdued classical way, Pietilä more boldly.
The most interesting and special roles in the club are Kari and Ilkka Heiskanen’s brothers Nikolai and Pavel. Both move almost recklessly on the border of caricature, but still in a serious, sad spirit of loss. Jyrki Nousiainen Prokofievich is born on the same stylistic scale of acting as his masters. The interpretation turns the young men into the only serious party in the story.
Seppo Maijala and Heidi Herala as Basarov’s parents form a fine, warm family unit.
The most independent of the characters in the novel has been the servants. Ursula Salo, who played the role of Susa Saukko in the premiere, is responsible for tuning the performance of Dunjashana to erotic frequencies from the very beginning of the first act. Sanna Majuri’s young hostess Fenitshka, on the other hand, is a sensitive maiden character who becomes the object of interest of all the men in the play.
Maija Pekkanen has costumed the characters immensely beautifully, the clothes contain charming details and also tell a lot about the people and their status.
Eradj Nazimovi’ssound design perhaps brings in a little unnecessary the sound of hooves to signal arrivals and departures. Instead, the bass beat at the moment of impending death is an impressive, almost imperceptible mood tuner. Sami Hokkanen’s song composed to a poem by Toni Edelman by Pushkin ends the performance with perfect elegance.
Ivan Turgenjev – Brian Friel: Fathers and Sons, translated and directed by Kari Heiskanen, set design by Hannu Lindholm, costumes by Maija Pekkanen, lighting design by Mika Ijäs, sound design and music dramaturgy by Eradj Nazimov. Finnish premiere on the big stage of the Helsinki City Theatre on 17 February 2005.