Review: Kuninkaan puhe
When the words don’t come
David Seidler’s The King’s Speech is a great text based on true events about the relationship between two men with completely different statuses. It also describes overcoming the injury caused by the unreasonable experiences of childhood. In addition, the text opens up even sensitive power patterns in the English court.
It is probably pointless to compare the stage adaptation to the award-winning film The King’s Speech directed by Tom Hooper, as it is impossible to reach the film’s intimate, small gesture interpretation on stage.
The large stage of the Helsinki City Theatre poses an interesting challenge to a text with a small framework.
The stage design of the performance, directed by Kari Heiskanen, is like a kingdom of giants. The smallness of man in the machinery of power and states is emphasized. The intimate becomes public in a colossal setting.
The space emphasizes the king’s anxiety when, on the eve of the Second World War, he finds himself on the same line as a speaker with Hitler and Stalin.
On the stage, there is only the monarchs’ room on one side, everything else is mainly built in empty space. The threatening situation in Europe is conveyed through moods and projections.
Rundman’s and Sveholm’s compelling collaboration
Australian speech teacher Lionel Logue uses idiosyncratic methods to try to get Prince Albert to believe in himself. Forced from left to right, the prince has always been in the shadow of his witty older brother and started stuttering at the age of eight.
Pertti Sveholm works on the role of Lionel in a seductively flexible manner. Lionel deliberately annoys the future king, but stealthily sneaks in experiences of success. Discord gradually turns into trust and eventually friendship.
Carl-Kristian Rundman’s George VI is a character stiffened by court etiquette. The comedy of the play is created when a child of the royal family comes face to face with an ordinary person.
Rundman does a strong role, and the stuttering sounds mostly natural. The person behind the king begins to take shape in a tender way.
The collaboration between Rundman and Sveholm is delightfully delicious. The tension between the king and the speech teacher sucks all the attention and so everything else on the stage is just a frame for it.
The performance, which is built up of quite short scenes, has to resort to solutions that feel like filler at the seams.
Despite its difficulties, the performance manages to scratch the surface of human vulnerability in such a way that it becomes an interesting theatre.