Review: Hemmafesten

COMEDY WITH A LAUGH GUARANTEE

Now, the well-known sitcom humour in Seinfeld, for example, where the living room serves as an arena for the comic situations the main characters encounter, has been relegated to the theatre stage in the Nordic premiere of Gilles Dyrek’s French comedy Hemmafesten at Lilla Teatern.

Comedy and farce have become something that amateur theatres in particular have often chosen to stage in Eastern Uusimaa, while Lilla Teatern has managed this heritage best among our Finland-Swedish professional theatres. If the Briton Ray Cooney, with his comedies of confusion, has long appeared to be the hottest screenwriter in Eastern Uusimaa, Gilles Dyrek’s Home Party as a genre is more restrained. In other words, one door does not slam shut with a bang just as another opens, and the action does not move forward on a broad front in gazebos, wardrobes and living rooms.

On the other hand, the current comedy, directed by Arn-Henrik Blomqvist and Gunilla Hemming’s fluid translation, is firmly rooted in the Finnish-Swedish Helsinki environment, about which the opening kisses on the cheek already speak for themselves.

Buddy with
Surpuppa

In the play, Jonte (Pekka Strang) has run into his old student friend Christoffer (Marc Svahnström) and invited him to his home for dinner at an apartment where he and his fiancée Ann-Louise (Cecilia Paul) will get married in a couple of weeks.
Christoffer does not arrive alone, but in the company of his exhausted girlfriend Patricia (Jonna Järnefelt), who is quiet and angry because she had argued with Christoffer just before.

This leads the young host couple to believe that Patricia is a linguistically disabled foreigner, which she quickly catches on to and exploits to the last drop of blood, despite Christoffer’s increasingly desperate protests.

In the end, the lie has turned into truth, but before that, a lot of things have changed hands in the name of “charity”, unexpected emotional storms have left deep cracks in young hearts, while the audience’s prejudices about people from foreign cultures have been shaken to their foundations at best.

Charming keynote

The structure of the house party is partly reminiscent of the Little Comedy The Foreigner from 1993 with Asko Sarkola in a brilliant role, but it is more sophisticated without being boring.

Although the plot on the whole rolls along in expected trajectories and the big twists and turns are missing, the comedy has such a charming and funny undertone that laughter is rarely absent. It also guarantees the confident acting performances, where the entire register from “normal” everyday uncertainty and silly crushes to pure ingenuity and almost madness is highlighted in four well-chiseled character studies.
At the same time, the house party is a play where you are not necessarily forced to look for a message, but where you can sit back and let yourself be entertained on the terms of a good situation comedy.