Review: Lainahöyhenissä

CAGE OPEN AND ARROGANTLY ONTO THE STAGE

Helsinki City Theatre’s old-fashioned Arena stage
exudes a French atmosphere in its premiere, which is carried out with joy and love by the crew of the play in Borrowed Feathers. From beginning to end, the multi-threaded events are dominated by Santeri Kinnunen and Pertti Koivula, both of whom have fallen on a role in the play that requires a discreet interpretation, without which the play would be left half-finished. But Kinnunen and Koivula don’t stop anything halfway, and for them, the last view of the stage says it all.

The play’s roots are in France, where Jean Poiret wrote the play La cage aux folles for the Palais-Royal, which translates to, for example, A Cage of Fools. From Paris, the play has also spread as a film, and the comic-tragic message of the plot has survived in its form that has now travelled all the way to Helsinki.

The story itself is not a new creation, but the limits allowed for its presentation are precise, or the whole plot becomes in bad taste. Georges, the tavern, is gay and the queen of the tavern, and the landlord’s lover is the transvestite Zasa, and in Helsinki, Koivula and Kinnunen. The third of the trio is Jean-Michel, aka Antti Timonen, who has grown up to be in love.

Whoever falls in love falls in love, but there is one problem in the plot, Jean-Michel’s father Georges is a father but gay, while the mother is flying somewhere and Zasa is a surrogate mother. Jean-Michel is about to get married, but the father of the bride-to-be is the arch-conservative Senator Dindon, who demands that the Mediterranean landscape be cleansed of all dross, including gays and transvestites. Dindon and his wife are expected to visit Jean-Michel, but the problem is that the senator is unlikely to give his daughter’s hand to Jean-Michel if the peculiarities of his growing environment are revealed.

Everything will work out, but the director of the play, Neil Hardwick , has a great merit in the fact that sexual peculiarities remain in the background and homosexuals and transvestites are almost becoming civilized. The music is captivating, thanks to conductor Kaisa Kulmala. The girl-boy dance group is going on, thanks to Mindy Lindblom. And the set design sometimes takes you to the atmosphere of Matisse or Dufy, thanks to Antti Mattila. All in all, thank you to everyone who did their job, the result hit the heart.