Review: Pariisin kukko

Feydeau’s farce captivates – for two acts

Miitta Sorval’s British donna is above the rest.

I can’t help it, one is above all the others in the Paris rooster of the Helsinki City Theatre.
Apparently, the French playwright Georges Feydeau hated the British with all his heart because he wrote a man-devouring British monster, Maggy Soldignac, in his farce.

Miitta Sorvali is divinely horrible, the brightest luminosity of the performance, boldly vulgar, fearlessly unstylish, and at the same time an irresistible master of all possible farce styles. I’m sold.

Still, as Maggie’s husband, as an ever-busy businessman, Carl-Kristian Rundman is like a reborn, shameless, lush, ironic comedian in the full sense of the word.

Unfortunately, neither of them will be seen in the third and final act of the play. The finale is a big problem for the rooster in Paris . Feydeau has not had the energy or the energy to write the final rise in his play, but ends his flogging of middle-class double standards with an obvious flight of chickens. The crowd decreases, the delicacies disappear.

Until the third act, however, The Rooster of Paris is an extremely skilfully constructed relationship mess, where new surprises and laughter make the evening the best possible in the farce genre, also on stage. In the hands of guest director Frej Lindqvist, the cast of the Parisian rooster is in really great shape. There is no fear of any clichés, but there is something personal associated with each of them, something new and fresh from both the director and the actor.

This interpretation is not very French or even Finnish-French, but it is excellent entertainment as it is.

There is not much to tell in the story itself. At first, all relationships get wonderfully mixed up in the name of infidelity. People run at the doors so that they bang. Then a few of these messes are fixed in that rather flat third act.

The City Theatre’s Paris Rooster is visually really handsome. Katariina Kirjavainen’s actually very stylish room solutions associated with the 1800s, with their starry skies and cloudy walls and aptly minimal style furniture, are a pleasure to look at. Markku Penttilä’s lighting licks Kirjavainen’s visions gracefully and sweetly. The grand space of the big stage does not seem absurd either, despite the play’s character as a room play. Like so often.

And then there are these costumes by Anneli Qveflander – incredible creations. Some, such as Sara Paavolainen’s wardrobe, represent the elegance of the era in a way that is pleasing to the eye. Parts, such as the freaks dressed up by Miitta Sorval, represent complete madness. The sum of things is rich, renewing and absolutely funny, except that at the end, the curly-tipped Arabic slippers tucked into Sami Uotila’s feet were apparently just awkward for the performer.

This brings us to the main point of the performance, the actors. The crowd is certainly in tune. Asko Sarkola is familiar, but sharply laconic. He knows all this. Sara Paavolainen in the role of the wife puts both technical mastery and feminine sweetness into the interpretation for really all the money. She is like Eliza from My Fair Lady who has settled into the social circles, so controlled and restrained, except that the rough past bursts out every now and then.


Risto Kaskilahti stretches to endlessly energetic with his unfortunate attempts at seduction, while Riitta Havukainen in the role of the betrayed wife becomes a chubby socialite. And what about Leena Uotila’s deaf wife and Matti Ranin’s major greedy for female beauty, they are also quite irresistible as a married couple, as well as, of course, Antti Litja as an old, dusty servant, like Macbeth’s gatekeeper.

Litja is a charming sophisticate. Sami Uotila is perhaps the team’s most inexperienced harbinger of a French farce, more of a boy scoundrel than a conqueror of all the world’s women in slavery. Mari Perankoski giggles quite conventionally in the world’s oldest profession. Antti Lang as the hotel piccolo and Vappu Nalbantoglu as the maid are part of the diversity of the Parisian rooster .

I’m not exactly one of the fans of farce, but I have to say that after getting through the search for the opening scenes, The Parisian Rooster is captivating theatre – for two acts.