Review: Kukkaistyttö
Ph.D. Frankenstein in Social Psychology
Kari Heiskanen turned My Fair Lady’s parent book into a biting social critique
Every now and then, you have to wait for the immortal songs of My Fair Lady, but once you get over this little fixation, there is enough to chew on in The Flower Girl, directed by Kari Heiskanen , for well over two and a half hours.
George Bernard Shaw’n Pygmalion, or The Flower Girl, is much better known as a bombproof musical version of institutional theatres, in which the story of a street upbringer and a stubborn professor of phonetics who rises to social circles has been tamed into a rather harmless romance.
Kari Heiskanen has seen it differently – rightly. Now there is no flare-up, and the drunks on the streets of London do not get the usual romanticization. Instead, Heiskanen’s direction polishes the social framework of Shaw’s story so sharply that it sometimes hurts.
Not only does Heiskanen himself play the lead role in the play as the dry Higgins, but he has also retranslated Shaw’s text into Finnish. Eliza (Anna-Maija Tuokko) is now twisting the broad slang of the city, but otherwise the story has been left in place in London at the turn of the 20th century.
The basic setting is, of course, timeless: one is born into wealth, the other is to live in misery. But what are the boundary conditions of the figure?
Spices from Smeds
Heiskanen’s direction adventures behind the scenes of the Helsinki City Theatre’s small stage with a video camera in a downright Smeds-like manner, without embellishing the ragged and unstable conditions of the gutter.
Even Katariina Kirjavainen’s stripped-down renovation stage does not try to hide the contradictions that the story, which relies on class society, is full of. Quite the opposite: upper-class style furniture is just as unat home in the unwallpapered walls as Eliza is in the bachelor court of the twisted Professor Higgins.
The comic smoothly cuts the tragic (sometimes lyrical and even absurd) on Heiskanen’s stage. Time and time again, we return to explore the possibility and meaning of the class leap.
It is not enough for a person to learn to speak like a gentleman if he or she is waiting to return to the same old decadence. When the form no longer corresponds to the content, the poor person’s identity can be downright dislocated – examples of this are the “tragically enriching” Alfred Doolittle (the excellent Pertti Koivula) and the Eynsford-Hill family, who lose their position overnight.
Beauty and the Beast
Henry Higgins, played by Kari Heiskanen, is Frankenstein, a doctor of social psychology who brazenly places himself on the top of creation, but notices that his offspring is becoming larger than his master.
Confusion ensues: a human experiment by Higgins and Colonel Pickering (Seppo Halttunen) (whether a flower girl challenging the fins at a nobleman’s party is good enough) leads to a situation where only something as vulgar as committing to an emotion could justify keeping the pattern intact.
Anna-Maija Tuokko plays Eliza in a brutally tearing way at first, but after learning to speak in a more polished way.
Ritva Valkama plays Higgins’ mother with appropriate restraint, whose conventionality hides a considerable amount of so-called silent wisdom.
Pekka Huotari’s dual role as a butler and a gangster who oppresses the proletariat also supports the starting point of the direction – after all, it is the task of both characters to keep people in their own class.
The ending of the story differs from the musical version in that Eliza no longer picks up those slippers: the angry chauvinist is left alone with his whims.