Review: Kukkaistyttö

From the gutters to the cream of the city

The actors and the text shine in Kari Heiskanen’s Flower Girl.

The Irishman George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) dealt with social problems with a comedic touch and linguistic mastery in his plays. The most famous, Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, based on it, brought him both a Nobel and an Oscar.

Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, makes a bet with Colonel Pickering that he can train Eliza Doolittle, a poor flower seller, to be a salon-worthy lady. Higgins is the mythical Pygmalion, who fell in love with the ivory statue he carved and no longer cared about real women.

Kari Heiskanen, who plays Higgins, has not only directed but also translated the play. Heiskanen gives Anna-Maija Tuokko plenty of space as Eliza, while retaining the dominance of Higgins’ character. Tuokko is convincing both as a foul-mouthed stubborn woman and as a woman who knows her own worth. Seppo Halttunen’s traditional Colonel Pickering balances between the pair.

The most enjoyable thing about the performance is to watch how the actors dose the text to the audience at just the right tempo so that the best parts are fully effective. The gaps between words are also utilized. At Higgins’ mother’s house, the audience waits for Eliza’s every line, which Tuokko then sovereignly redeems also in the body language of Eliza’s controlled nature, which tells about the fragility of her being.

Shaw makes the hypocrisy of the privileged class ridiculous and elevates the trash diver Alfred Doolittle as a moral philosopher, in whose role the hilarious Pertti Koivula manages to convey the satire inside the text so that Doolittle’s comic character is at times reminiscent of today’s business preachers.

At least some of the videotaped scenes shown on the screen that descends into the background are those that Shaw originally marked as possible to remove because they require film technology. A peek into Eliza’s cramped attic room and first bath brings in a reality TV atmosphere and at the same time increases the intensity of the feeling by letting the viewer closer. The video clips also support the structure and rhythm of the performance.

Shaw mocks the parched sexuality of the British, even though he himself considered sex a childish obsession. Heiskanen’s Higgins manages to be both genderless and hint that he could poke Eliza in the cheek with the same passion as he crunches an apple. Whether they will become a couple is not self-evident, because during her transformation, Eliza discovers that there is more dignity in the gutter than at Higgins’ place on haughty Wimpole Street.