Review: Svartsjuka

THE BLACK FEVER AFFECTS EVERYONE

The German-Argentine author Esther Vilar became famous with her book Der dressierte Mann in 1971, in which she questioned most of the arguments of contemporary feminists. According to Vilar, it was the men who were exploited by the women and not the other way around.

In a TV duel a few years later, women’s rights activist Alice Schwarzer branded Vilar as “not only a sexist but also a fascist”. Esther Vilar felt she had to leave Germany because of death threats. She has continued her writing with: pamphlets in which she questions the accepted views of feminism and the left-wing movement, as well as a whole series of spiritual and tendentious plays.
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Jealousy (Eifersucht. Drama für drei Faxmaschinen) was first performed in Paris in 2001 and has since been performed around Europe. It is, as so much Vilar has written, a play about the struggle between the sexes, but above all an unpolitically correct portrayal of the struggle between women. Top lawyer Helen (55), successful architect Yana (40) and yoga teacher Iris (25) all live in a shiny new and chrome-plated 30-storey building, designed by Yana’s architectural firm.

Vilar allows these attractive and independent professional women to fall in love with the same man, Helen’s husband Lazlo, a gray-haired, bullet-bellied but apparently charming lawyer whom the audience never gets to see and hardly misses. Behind the scenes, he directs the women’s lives by moving now to one or the other. And every time this happens, the smooth façade cracks on one of the women.

Jealousy – the black sickness – affects them all according to the same pattern and they are reduced to screaming, suffering, irrational beings ready to throw themselves at each other. So much for feminist women’s cohesion.

Vilar emphasizes the contrast between modern man’s orderly isolation and her emotional chaos by never allowing the three women to meet, even though they live in the same house and sometimes even catch a glimpse of each other in the entrance. They communicate with each other mechanically, via diabolical insinuating, furious, commanding, pleading, or conciliatory fax messages.

From these ingredients, director Raila Leppäkoski makes an entertaining but fundamentally tragic production on the stage of Lilla Teatern. Antti Mattila’s sophisticated and at the same time sterile set design and Maija Pekkanen’s buttoned-up elegant costumes underline the rational modernity of the two older women. Jonna Järnefelt is as good and rude as Yana, only to be humiliated in an almost animalistic way. Leena Uotila plays the role of the sovereign and collected Helen with an emphasis on the slightly ironic and the warmly mundane. Perhaps I miss a more macabre tone when Helen’s character shift turns out to be the most surprising. Some doubtful pauses and ambiguities in the diction are certainly worked out. During the premiere, they still disturbed the rhythm of the performance a little, which is mainly about punchy speed.


Cecilia Pauls Iris is disarming and clear-eyed charming, seemingly a being from a different and better world than Helen and Yana’s. Until it turns out that she is just as selfish, as irrationally vulnerable as the older women.

There was a lot of laughter during the premiere at Lillan. Everything was so witty, so cool. But Esther Vilar’s play also evokes genuine reflections. What exactly is jealousy, besides laughable behavior and a need to exercise power and control? As Merete Mazzarella writes in the program leaflet, there is also another kind of jealousy:
“There is a jealousy that is neither more nor less than the price we have to pay for love, because there are people who are infinitely precious to us, whom we are afraid of losing, whom we depend on simply because we do not want to live without them.”

Vilar’s demonstration of a lack of women’s cohesion also raises another question. Why shouldn’t friendship be possible between these well-articulated, intelligent women, whatever their originator claims? The whole play is a wonderful expression of communication.