Review: Pappas pojkar

Uncomfortable secrets in family drama at Lilla Teatern

In Daddy’s Boys , we follow a family over two time periods. In one we learn how everything really happened and that father Louis (Sampo Sarkola) had an affair with the beautiful housekeeper Bella (Edith Holmström) and in the other we get to see the adult children who visit their father’s funeral with their wives.

There is a lot you can recognize during the play. How differently we communicate, for example, depending on the surroundings we have moved in the most. It is especially amusing to watch when the brothers and their wives initially try to keep up some kind of conversation, even though they don’t really have much to say to each other.

The brother Reggie, played by Nicke Lignell , drives in a luxury sports car and has so much money that he doesn’t even care about the inheritance, while the other brother Tony (Sixten Lundberg) has not fared as well, who feels unfairly treated.

The wives, who are as if they had come from different planets, mostly get along in the women’s universal way by talking about trivial things, while their husbands, like masters, cannot avoid the obvious conflicts and misunderstandings that they have been thinking about over the years. It results in arm wrestling, drunkenness and a couple of cool dialogues about how it all really happened.
It is Pia Runnakko, who, with her wonderful body language and her self-evident manner, is the one who causes most laughter in the auditorium. It’s also rewarding to play the slightly plump, poorly dressed wife who is interested in astrology and quasi-insteinian theories. Mia Hafrén, plays her well-dressed character Elisabeth at least as well, and it is when she, dirty and furious, has her little outbursts of anger, that she is most visible.

As I watch the performance, I find myself thinking about how certain lines would have sounded in British English. And of course, it’s British humour, it’s jokes and puns that belong in another language, but despite that, most of it also fits well in Finland-Swedish interpretation.
The women in the show are either stupid, dizzy, richly married or longing for a man – and the men are confused and weak for women’s beautiful charms. So we are not dealing with complex role personalities and that is not the intention either. Daddy’s Boys is a comedy that is really funny in places, a comedy that also has black undertones.