Review: På fullt allvar

VERBAL AND VISUAL FANTASY ABOUT ERNEST

Oscar Wilde wrote four comedies, of which The Importance of Being Earnest from 1895 was the last and best. The title is a play on words with the sound similarity between earnest (serious, serious) and Ernest (the name). Not even such an experienced translator as Per Erik Wahlund has been able to play the same way in Swedish, but has had to settle for the much tamer På helt seriousvar.
Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff fall in love with a wonderful girl each. But since both girls think that Ernest is the most beautiful boy’s name there is, both young men each pretend to be in their own way – completely unserious! – to be called Ernest. Such things are punished sooner or later in a comedy of confusion. But Wilde complicates and dissolves the plot in such a cunning way that the lie actually becomes truth, and in the final minutes the concepts of Ernest and Earnest coincide.
An intellectual and verbal game, in other words, that gives this piece its very own profile within the endless number of salon comedies. If you want to play it well, you have to hit the right spot, do something different and more than just boulevard in general. And Lilla Teatern’s actors are in a gratifying way the play’s adults. The result has been a stylish, intelligent and highly entertaining production directed by Neil Hardwick .
It starts in the calmest with a first act in Algernon’s bachelor den where the foundation is laid for the plot, an act that is not so easy to get going, dangerously dominated by conversation in a sitting position.
But immediately after the break, the lies begin to bloom and with it the game. Sampo Sarkolas Algernon is a young dandy with a gentle voice, an innocent mouth position and half-closed eyelids, who surprises by suddenly climbing into Cecily’s garden swing under the name Ernest. Edith Holmström makes her a blonde and softly smiling ingénue, as it was called during Wilde’s era, and the charm of the scenes between the two lies not least in a common childlike innocence.

Each other’s opposites

Jack is played by Pekka Strang, as slender as Sarkola but even more elongated so that, kneeling in front of his Gwendolen who still thinks his name is Ernest, he seems to spread at least one leg at a time across the stage floor.
As so often before, Strang and Sarkola form a radar pair, but their characters are at the same time opposites, Algernon completely amoral, Jack with a clearly Victorian ambition to keep up at least appearances at all times.
Jack also has to fight the opposition of Gwendolen’s mother Lady Bracknell, a particularly dominant older lady. Her function in the plot is to promote or prevent marriage, which Birgitta Ulfsson does superbly with a hoarse, raw voice and with a line like a cutter.

Cécile Orblin portrays a very independent daughter under such conditions, with some indication that the apple may not have fallen very far from the tree. Tom Wentzel plays a vicar with a cold, Pia Runnakko a sympathetic governess and Joachim Wigelius two clearly separated servants. All in all, this is a well-balanced and coordinated ensemble.
And it has been dressed in costumes whose color scheme and light, light material are pleasing to the eye. They are led by Kirsti Kasnio, who, in addition to her theatre profession, is also a fashion designer. Her performance sweeps the performance in an airy visual fantasy, which meets Wilde’s verbal fantasy.