Review: Ulkomaalainen

On tolerance under the guise of comedy

Larry Shue’s American comedy has been shown in Finland before, both in Finnish and Swedish. The Finnish interpretations were seen in 1989 in Vaasa, in 1992 in Tampere and in 1993 in Helsinki (Lilla Teatern, which performed the work first in Swedish and then in Finnish). The interpretation of KT now seen is the handiwork of several comedy specialists and is guaranteed to make you laugh.

The pilot of The Foreigner is Pentti Kotkaniemi, who has long been one of the Finnish comedy masters. Let’s remember, for example, the best-of-its-kind reinterpretations of the man’s Finnish comedy classics in Tampere. Kotkaniemi has also directed many hits for the Helsinki Theatre: Stones in the Pocket and Salaa rakas, just to name a few.

The suspicion and xenophobia of foreigners in America is reflected in the play by Larry Shue (1946-85), who died in a plane crash, which premiered in 1983 and which at the time of the dramatist’s death was broadcast to full houses in New York, among other places. The issues included in the work are still topical.

Santeri Kinnunen plays Charlie Baker, a shy American man who arrives to rest and spend a holiday with his old friend (Jari Pehkonen), who works as a rebel in the ameija, in the peace of the countryside. Froggy’s plans have changed a bit, but he arranges a room for Charlie for a couple of days at a nearby guesthouse whose talkative hostess (Riitta Havukainen) is his friend. To allow Charlie to be alone, Froggy makes up the emergency lie that Charlie is a foreigner and doesn’t speak their language.

At first, Charlie is not very willing to play the alien, but when he happens to overhear a personal conversation between two people, he is forced to settle for his role. Well, mishaps follow and in the end, the situation escalates to the extreme when the redneck Owen (Pertti Sveholm), a local conservative and member of the racially hating organization Klan (aka the Ku Klux Klan), decides to take the reins and discipline a foreigner who is considered dangerous, among other things, with his hooded friends.

Vappu Nalbantoglu plays Cat, the mistress’s cousin, whom David (Mikko Pörhölä), a shady priest who is pursuing an inn inheritance, intends to marry. Cat’s surviving brother Ellard (Hannes Suominen) is supposed to be played out of the picture so that David and his henchmen can take control of the house. (At that time in the United States, the husband still took care of the finances, although some of them were originally his wife’s property.) They intend to establish the headquarters of their hate organization in the house.

Thanks also to the top actors, the work works and reaches the sharpest edge of the text. Some small flaws (a slightly too long scene in Charlie’s native language, etc.) can easily be forgiven. The interpretation, which starts lazily, condenses appropriately towards the finale. That’s where the revs go really high.