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One big family hell
Kari Heiskanen makes a handsome return to the stage with Edward Albee in the second lead role of Virginia Woolf
Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The small stage of the Helsinki City Theatre. Translated by Juha Siltanen. Control: Reko
Lundán. Set design by Teppo Järvinen, costumes by Maija Pekkanen, lighting by Mika Ijäs, sound by Kirsi Peteri. Cast: Sara Paavolainen, Kari
Heiskanen, Vappu Nalbantoglu and Kari-Pekka Toivonen.
American classics continue their rush in Helsinki’s theatres. The recipe is shared. The same director and title actors. Fresh in my memory is the performance of Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Merchant on the City Theatre’s main stage. Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Roof, which is currently playing at the National Theatre, has now been joined by Edward Albee’s Who
afraid of Virginia Woolf? performance at the City Theatre.
Translated by both had Juha Siltanen. All three performances have been directed by Reko Lundán. The performances are built on the good old American star acting tradition. And it is true that the plays have been written
strong shoulders. Virginia Woolf, in particular, is a masterpiece of speech and verbal acrobatics, with endless verbal wars. From the performers
It requires charisma. Without it, the viewer will be exhausted already at the starting line. Who would now voluntarily watch the 1960s gin-fumed people fighting for hours at the afterparty in the morning?
Charisma glows on the small stage of the City Theatre. It enters at the first door opening, when Kari Heiskanen’s literary
Professor George drags his wife Martha, Sara Paavolainen, into the room, who is in a state of exhaustion. Both were last seen as a married couple tearing each other apart in Maria Jotun’s unforgettable television version of The Wobbly House. Even now, Heiskanen’s trademark is the familiar cold and intense meanness. The devil is disguised in the professor’s glasses.
The mental hoof foot is knocking so hard that loved ones can’t breathe from the sulfur smell.
Heiskanen is I’ve been working hard as a director for a long time. His return to acting shows that his acting skills have not deteriorated – quite the opposite.
Inner strength is even more charged. Others have work to do in it. Sara Paavolainen’s Martha has to pick up speed and volume as she develops her counterforce from her first line onwards
that the scale is no longer enough for a three-hour cross-country run. Here, it would have been the director’s part to slow down the performance to such a rhythm and construction of turning points that the expression would not escape
permanent sunshine. Or maybe it was just a release of the pressure of the premiere? Hopefully, the role will calm down, as Sara Paavolainen puts a lot of people at risk
and bare.
Skeletons in the closets fall in Albee’s text already at the beginning. Dead child, imaginary and literary murders, car accidents, incest, money marriages
and other forced marriages are flooded with a whole litany. You only meet unhappy people like this in real life. How do you support a story that grinds the same record endlessly? Everyone
The stripe should bring out a new trait, tone or degree of openness in the person. In that respect, too many necessary and important things are buried under the hysteria and ferocity of the City Theatre’s interpretation
nuances. Raging is not interesting, not even in the name of pathological sexism, if it has no other address than the other’s mental
or physical subjugation. In order to grow into a multi-tone and multi-layered reveal story, Virginia Woolf would need a dose of more shades. To the modern nerve
To strike, it screams for shortening and faster cuts.
Two married couples A mutual battle, a show of strength between two generations and sides, has been made physically spectacular. However, both Vappu Nalbantoglu’s Honey and Kari-Pekka Toivonen’s Nick are both American characters and
They should be shaken properly. Stupid blondes are a joke with us, Albee is not. There is work to be done. Nick, a biologist and a male, forced to swing “like a dog”, does not offer Professor George any real resistance. Heiskanen is also in a cockfight
such an overwhelmingly intelligent tactician.
Without Juha Siltanen ironically funny and sharp modern language the play would have really turned yellow. On the other hand, I didn’t understand Teppo Järvinen’s dollhouse set design at all. Is the performance meant to be watched from a bird’s eye view? And when the author describes the middle-class American university world of the 1960s, you don’t sit in the professor’s home
Rectangular prole sofas made of artificial leather.
The premiere audience showed However, judging by the final applause, he gratefully liked what he saw. In Virginia Woolf, the relationships that have been condemned to be demolished collapse at least spectacularly and loudly enough. Fortunately, there is silence at the end. Maybe there is hope in that? I’m not quite sure.