Review: Tango
Tango steps lead the intellectual to a dead end
The radical father is terrifying. Jouko Klemettilä as Artur’s son is horrified by the decline of values in his parents and the rest of society. The boy would like to restore lost old values – formality and tradition – in place of erotic uninhibition and decadence.
“Only a farce is possible,” says Slawomir Mrozek’s 1965 drama: values have disappeared from the world, tragedy no longer exists, because no one takes it seriously.
Tango is from the time when plays were often metaphorical. They dealt with society in ways that were not always completely clear, but the viewer had to think about what it was all about; In Eastern European countries, contemporary criticism was also cloaked in all kinds of camouflage to distract censorship.
Tango is also said to be a parodic reference to Hamlet: a young man is ashamed of his parents’ behavior and his mother’s infidelity, and rebels against the devastation and moral vacuum caused by the previous generation.
Tango has Kafkaesque black comedy in places, it is a farce, a tragedy and a tragicomedy. Mrozek’s stylistic device is to mix the types of plays: that is why the play is still surprising and thought-provoking.
But Poland, the 60s and the landmark play of its time – how do they fit in with Finland, the 2000s and the Helsinki City Theatre?
34 years ago, Maija Savutie, a respected critic of Kansan Uutiset, called Tango an intellectual dead end. At that time, the Finnish National Theatre performed Tango under the direction of Jack Witikka. Savutie wrote: “Tango is a pessimistic and very bitter play.”
It is a question of generations: the play’s Eleonora and Stomil are the children of the cheerful and superficial 20th century – and the generation that brought about the world war and chaos.
Their son Arthur, on the other hand, is an intellectual who accuses them of a void of values and abandonment of forms. Artur wants the world to have its former morality and order.
The central question is who or what restores form and order, who wields power, and when it becomes violence.
Under the direction of Milko Lehto , Tango is danced in the present day. The parents are quite harmless hippie solidarity people from the 1960s and 70s, on the side of free upbringing and loose sexual morality.
Artur scolds them for lack of order and indolence. Parents, grandmother and uncle like to play cards in their messy living room together with the taciturn muscle guy who has nestled in the apartment; Edek is his mother’s “friend”.
In the 1960s, the fear of dictatorship and dictators was still real in Europe. When, at the end of the play, a representative of physical strength took a supporter of old values into a claustrophobic tango, the laughter of the audience was guaranteed to get stuck in the throat. The farce ended in a grotesque dance – on the ruins of Western civilization?
The play doesn’t feel very bitter anymore. It has lost most of the nerve fibers that connected it directly to time. Now satire refers to the imaginary. But what remains is the discussion about the values of ideologies and the comedy of portraits. This is used in the City Theatre’s performance in a bold way.
Klemettilä is cleverly serious
Jouko Klemettilä skillfully maintains Arturi’s serious-like unpredictability, without giving in too much to the comedy of this quirk.
Artur’s intellectual tension is in hilarious contrast, especially with Erkki Saarela’s father, Stomil.
Saarela is a cheerful clown, a hedonist, whose “avant-garde” produces Pekka Korpiniity’s interesting pile of rubbish by staging outrageous performances on stage. Maija Pekkanen’s costumes have theatrical eye candy and irony.
The mother, played by Leena Uotila, is of the same generation as her husband, a down-to-earth guy who is considered erotically satisfied by Pekka Huotari’s uncivilized, giggling macho Edek.
Eeva-Liisa Haimelin is an original grandmother, while Jarkko Rantanen’s uncle is bursting with the old aristocracy, whose helplessness in the face of change is hopelessly deep.
Cécile Orblin is Artur’s cousin and capricious girlfriend Ala, whose erotic uninhibitedness haunts Artur – after all, he thirsts for formality and traditions, such as a real wedding.
But the farce turns into tragedy when Artur realizes that old values cannot be restored. “Only power can be created out of nothing,” concludes Artur. When lost values cannot be revived, what remains is the quest for power.
However, the intellectual is not able to hold power, says Mrozek, but in the value vacuum it is taken over by a physically powerful mass. Fascism, neo-Nazism, skinheads?
The talkative dialogue, the repetition of the dramatic aesthetics of the last century, could have been summed up a little without suffering the issue. The themes of tango are still interesting, as long as you dig them out. The dramatic surprises are also there.