Review: Väärennetty morsian

COLORFUL MARRIAGE GAME

But the result is at least very interesting – this time it’s about the visually colorful performance Fake Bride.

For the first time, a Chinese director, Kong Xinyuan, has collaborated with Finnish actors on a spoken theatre stage. And the result is brilliant.

The stage sparkles with the joy of playing, humour, comedy, relaxed atmosphere, exciting physical movements and creative throat sounds, as well as slightly ironic parody elements.

Sami Keski-Vähälä has written the play The Counterfeit Bride , which is based on an old Chinese folk tale, a comic tale from the Ming Dynasty known in China. It tells about the complications that arise when the parents decide on suitable bride and groom candidates.

Director Kong Xinyuan, who has previously made a guest appearance in Finland, has together with set designer Yu Gang and costume designer Zhang Yi created a small masterpiece. The Finnish actors have even managed to get into the Chinese acting tradition to some extent, but have nevertheless been directed with appropriately distancing ironic-parodic dimensions.

In any case, much of the skilfully choreographed movement scheme and the shrill voices contain elements from Chinese theatre.

When you also add the soundscape, which is mostly based on the traditional Peking opera, the whole becomes very diversely interesting. This includes a lot of physical theatre that gives the whole performance an extra expressive dimension.

Risto Kaskilahti makes a skillful, fully played-out, primordial comic interpretation of Zhang, the matchmaker who contributes to the intrigue between the different families and their respective bride and groom candidates. In and of itself, the story itself becomes a typical comedy of entanglement, but the exciting execution and the Chinese cultural tradition conveyed here create a fascinating whole. All the actors manage to carry out their “Chinese” roles in an integrated way, as do the four dancers who develop interesting movements in the stretcher and other scenes. Jyrki Nousiainen is the clownish judge who at the end gets to sort out the mess with the counterfeit bride, Tuukka Leppänen, who meets the fake groom, Reetta Honkakoski.