Review: Huijarin muistiinpanot

Relationships get you and you can get along the thigh

Theatre: HKT’s hilarious satire pushes temporary hipsters into the career path by all means.

Hello you temporary worker in the creative industry! Are you tired of constant uncertainty? Are you annoyed that no one realizes your abilities and gives you a lucrative permanent job?

If you want to get ahead in your life, you need to get into circles. So we have to start flattering those in power. Of course, when the going gets tough, you also have to agree to be a bed toy for old ladies.

This is more or less the kind of “life advice” that Helsinki City Theatre’s Notes of the Impostor imposes on its viewer.

Directed by Kari Heiskanen , the satire feels hopelessly confusing at first, but once the laborious introductory episode is over, the drama begins to knock on its tracks like a feverishly tweeting urban intellectual during the best social media controversies.

The Impostor’s Notes is based on a text by Alexander Ostrovsky , a Russian who lived in the 1800s. I haven’t read the original version, but I can say with certainty that Heiskanen has put quite a lot of his own into the plar.

Ostrovski would hardly have rubbed his play with references to the government’s sustainability gaps or Himanen’s report on the future, for example.

At the center of the story is Yegor Glumov (Pekka Strang), an urban intellectual, who has mastered the word, the swagger and the stinging way of thinking, but really nothing else. She lives with her sullen mother (Leena Rapola), keeps a diary of “human lowliness” and envies her more successful friends.

One day, it turns out that his distant relative is the wealthy and influential Odysseus Mamayev (Jari Pehkonen). They meet by a lucky coincidence. It wasn’t long before Glumov had fabricated nonsense texts for Mamayev and his friends. They are intended to make the working people believe that the owning class must necessarily become even richer.

After that, Glumov is already being married to a cousin (Sanna-June Hyde) of a very rich widow (Tiia Louste).

Heiskanen’s direction is an electrifyingly paced and joyfully over-the-top herring salad. The tasteless cardboard backdrop scenery floats happily away from time and place somewhere on its own cloud.

Although the characters are stubborn, the comedy still finds its charm in Glumov’s trajectory, which has a steep rise and an equally steep fall.

Pekka Strang is funny as a self-sufficient hipster who likes to lick the butt of any useful idiot. Turning his coat around doesn’t even cause any remorse, because Glumov has never had any convictions.

Riitta Havukainen plays a wife who is a sucker for Mamayev’s praises, and who consciously bolsters her own self-esteem with Glumov’s lies.