Review: Järki ja tunteet

With your permission, I’ll fall in love with a rich man

Theatre: Laura Jäntti successfully freshened up Jane Austen’s classic.

Jane Austen’s Sense and Emotions sounds like the kind of text that Laura Jäntti should avoid from afar. In recent years, Jäntti has mainly directed new Finnish drama and strict classics, at least not the kind of romantic entertainment that Austen’s book has often (perhaps erroneously) been perceived as.

However, Jäntti’s fresh direction is a good indication that even the epochal drama with an emphasis on human relationships can be viewed with a suitable touch to the present day.

Jäntti takes the essence of Austen’s book – the struggle between emotion and reason – and puts it under a magnifying glass, as it were. In this way, the director simultaneously pays homage to the original work and, on the other hand, creates an interpretation of it in which the lives of the protagonists begin to look not only compulsive but also comical.

In Jane Austen’s day, the struggle of the daughters of the Dashwood family for a livelihood was of course not amusing, but the truest reality.

In England in the early 1800s, a woman was more or less forced to get a man, preferably a financially sound one, because unmarried women were easily exposed. On the other hand, the Romantic era and the individualistic way of thinking reared its head, according to which trusting emotions guides a person to happiness more surely than reason.

Austen has written this confrontation into the personalities of Marianne and Elinor. Elinor is a reserved reasoner, while Marianne is a flamboyant bastard who only accepts the greatest of emotions. Of course, it says something about Austen’s quality as a writer that they both have to make concessions to their principles before a happy ending can come.

The stage image is bare and yet charged in a strange way. The entire first act is built around a seesaw, a vague pile of sand and a tiny closet – there is plenty of symbolism.

By stripping the story of its naturalistic framework, Jäntti succeeds in emphasizing the pretense and meticulous social codes that dominated a woman’s life in Austen’s day.

You had to keep up the façade if you wanted to stay in the favor of the “circles” and get married well. In other words, relationships were full work for women.

Of the roles , Sara Meller’s Marianne is particularly memorable. Melleri interprets Marianne in an overemphatically pathetic way, with an almost hysterical frenzy, until the world takes away the 17-year-old romantic’s beliefs.

Kreeta Salminen is more even as the pretty-looking Elinor – but is abstaining from emotions the greatest of emotions?

Of course, it is not easy for the young men in the story, who are rattling with the demands of the world. Wealth is an imperative in a man’s life, which is perhaps only overridden by a gentleman’s sense of honor. But then there are also those women to whom you should be able to talk about more than just hounds.