Review: Metsä
Molière’s play The Forest, which owes it to his comedies: Patinas and pathets in place
Sometimes it’s good to go to the theatre to see a performance that you haven’t had high expectations of in terms of content or visual mind-blowing, either from the director’s creative theatrical language. You can just sit down, just let the stage take you by the unstartled events.
The Forest on the big stage of the Helsinki City Theatre is that kind of theatre. Unhurried and finished, but unsurprising passage of time. In the play, written by Aleksandr Ostrovsky almost a century and a half ago, the character has something of the everlasting dramatic art that Anton Chekhov introduced two or three decades later.
In the forest, you can recognize echoes of Chekhov, people’s confusion on the border between the old and some new world. It also has the same kind of lingering, but is a bit more action-packed when written as a comedy.
Molière spicy soup
The core issues of Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s The Forest, which is considered the father of Russian drama, are greed and altruism that opposes it. The widow Raisa Pavlovna Gurmyzhkaya, a widow who is obsessed with her fortune, runs a microcosm in which relatives, employees and neighboring farmers alike spin according to her whistle. Or rather, he is used to it, until the day comes when the structure begins to crack at every corner: Aksinja, who grew up under the protection of a lady, rebels against her aunt’s plans to marry him, the neighbour’s landlord is a jerk in the forest deals, and another nephew who has strayed into an even dishonorable field, i.e. a roving actor in the countryside, and his fellow travellers end up on the farm.
The result is a mess that owes money to Molière’s comedies, in which, at worst, money, love and justice are lost at the same time. Fortunately, the resourceful tragedy actor Nestšaslivtsev has so many of the latter that in the end, the real lovers find each other and the accounts are more or less even.
Ostrovsky’s play pays homage to the cornerstones of theatre, the self-sacrificing actors. Reminiscent of the cunning and skilful servant character Sganarelle from Moliere, Nestšastlivtsev has unparalleled professional pride that can withstand even the most vicious attempts at humiliation, and his comrade, the comedian Stastlivtsev, on the other hand, copes with adversity with casual banter.
The fact that these roles are played by two veterans who know everything there is to know about comedy acting, Asko Sarkola and Esko Roine (both of whom also have a lot of experience as theatre directors), adds a nuanced spice to the dialogue. A charming hint of self-irony floats in the air.
Condensed acting
Sarkola has been cast as the director of The Forest and himself by a man who knows this play, the writer’s psyche and the tradition of Russian theatre inside out. Yuri Solomin , the director of the renowned Maly Theatre in Moscow, has both acted and directed Russian drama. He is especially known as a director who draws attention to acting, and this can also be seen on the spacious stage of the City Theatre. The gestures and speech are thought out to the last detail, the comedy is stripped of all the chatter and idle laughter. The characters in the play are so skilfully inscribed with a sweet Slavic pathos that it does not need to be overemphasized in the acting.
The simplified expression permeates the entire performance, which becomes a problem on the Tokoinranta stage. When precision speech has to be “continued” with microphone amplification, it becomes unnaturally resonant. A smaller stage would probably have been better for this performance, but when in addition to Sarkola (66 years) and Roine (67), there are also attractions such as Lasse Pöysti (84) and Tom Wentzel (64) from the veteran department on stage, the opportunity is not wasted in small halls.
The butler character, endearingly played by Pöysti, has a heartfelt patina, the very glimpse of the past world at the dawn of new times. The same is true of Wentzel’s half-deaf Bodayev, for whom the old practices of the patriarchal community are sacred.
However, the most delicious role in the play is probably the matron Raisa Petrovna, played by Tiina Pirhonen , who is captivatingly two-faced, but ultimately unarmed in the face of a love that flares up once more.
As a counterbalance to the veterans, Antti Lang as the landlord’s dizzying son and Kreeta Salminen as the sweet Aksinja, burned by inhibited love, create brightness and colour to the patina surface.