Review: Fröken, champagne!
GUILTY CONSCIENCE OR NOT
Theatre
Johan Bargum:
Miss, champagne!
Director: Kalep Kagoda. Set design: Kalep Kagoda, Tomi Kuusiniemi. Costumes: Nina Virkki. Lighting: Jan-Erik Pihlström. Cast: Sixten Lundberg, Joachim Wigelius, Anitta Niemi. Premiere in Lilla Teatern’s foyer 3.4.
In the foyer of Lilla Teatern, the audience sits down around small tables to follow a conversation between two men who have a common past. This is Johan Bargum’s newly written text, the one-act play Fröken, champagne! in which Sixten Lundberg’s Bertil and Joachim Wigelius’ Mårten, two bank robbers, meet again after ten years to think about what happened then, later and what can happen now in the play’s real time as the crime will soon expire. They sit at a table in front of the audience and wait to order something to eat and drink. At the same time, Joachim Wigelius Mårten keeps wondering why Bertil wants them to meet again, since they decided ten years ago never to see each other again.
It also seems to have gone well for the bank robbers thanks to the successful robbery because Bertil, from having been a car salesman, now owns a car dealership and Mårten has been upgraded from a travel agency official to the owner of a travel agency.
The fifty-minute performance, which is also called café theatre, is said to be directed by Kalep Kagoda , who also made the set design together with Tomi Kuusiniemi . Who the director really is remains unclear because the person in question does not show up after the performance to receive applause from the audience. Maybe Kalep Kagoda wants to be completely anonymous or maybe it’s an over-interpreted question of a ploy that those who have read the Tarzan books can relate to. There, “kagoda” in the language of the great apes means “I give up”.
The performance contains certain elements of surprise that will not be revealed here. Language policy is also included in the play when the waitress (Anitta Niemi) shows up to take orders from Lundbergs Bertil, who refuses to speak anything other than Swedish. The scams of the financial world are also discussed between the two accomplices, who at the same time go through what really happened ten years ago and what led to the third robber, Frank, so suddenly, shortly after the robbery, dying in a car accident.
A little dramatic escalation and variation in the direction are also included in the performance when Bertil and Mårten break the static sitting at the table a few times. Violent emotions flare up in different contexts depending on the guilt reasoning between the two characters.
One can, if one wishes, also read irony and perhaps a humorous metatextual plane into the performance and criticism of financial life.