Review: Otetaas toiset!
You can laugh in the arena.
“Intellectual comedy” is not one of those epithets that should be adapted to the Helsinki City Theatre’s fresh interpretation of the comedy Fair and Warmer, written by the American Avery Hopwood a hundred years ago, on the Arena stage.
The comedy “Brain to the cloakroom” might be the most apt genre definition for this mess, and not in any dissing or derogatory sense.
That just gives an indication that Hopwood’s comedy doesn’t offer far-reaching verbal flexibility or a parody of a way of life. It uses sitcoms and a pure door-slamming farce to make the most of two things, a marital crisis and a drunken person.
Whoever grabs the bottle…
The plaster-phone-stunt-stunt-farce translated into Finnish by Reita Lounatvuori has been courtingly named “Otetaas toiset”, which is not even enough when the show’s fast-paced couple really gets a taste of liquor. This unbraked duo has no previous experience of firefighting.
Mr. Billy Bartlett is an absolutist for the umpteenth generation, and his burp ten, Blanny Wheeler, is also a very impeccable lady. By the way, a lady to Billy’s neighbor, friend and financial colleague Jack Wheeler, who is not such a decent husband.
The whole avalanche starts when Billy and Blanny notice that their spouses are attracted to strangers. It begins to dawn on them that it is precisely their own decency – that is, boredom – that may be the reason for the light-footedness of the wings. After the two of them have stayed at the newspaper, they decide to put their lives to jails and fall into something “sensitive”. They even want to get caught “in the lurch”, even though they don’t really know what the concept means exactly. But that might get your loved ones on their “toes”…
From thought to action. Billy and Blanny start making some cocktails as their spouses leave for the stove. And seriously for the purpose of getting drunk. They don’t have any basic knowledge of the art of mixed drinks, so they put everything they can find in a well-stocked liquor cart into the bucket. Bucket glasses are not used for overturning, but vases. Champagne is sipped from the mouth of a bottle.
And there we go. While Billy and Blanny have lived a reserved life all their lives, they are very thoroughly freed from inhibitions in a persuasive drunken state. I have to say that Esko’s first drunk from Nummisuutari is second only to this stage juggernaut.
The play’s descent into a hangover, a showdown and finally the survival of everything and everyone after the intermission is a more even-out, but not much more flattering comedy. Instead of the shenanigans, the viewer’s main attention is now focused on the precise timing of the farce’s transport.
A celebration of the actors
Otetaas toinen is a brisk old-fashioned actor-driven comedy. Arn-Henrik Blomqvist has directed first-class comedy actors, at the forefront, of course, Jouko Klemettilä and Heidi Herala, who tear at least a hundred dozen glasses in the roles of Billy and Blanny. They must have had fun already in rehearsals when developing drunken choreographies, and the fun is well conveyed to the audience as well. The imagination flies, for example, in the entertainment use of the movables at hand.
Jari Pehkonen as the slippery Jack Wheeler and Jonna Järnefelt as Laura Bartlett, who has been bored by the boring union, accompany the main pair, giving her enough space. Eppu Salminen has a slightly more clichéd role as Laura’s lively ex-fiancée. Vappu Nalbantoglu makes funny appearances on stage as a French maid. The name of this Marie-Claire is difficult for the gentry to remember, so she is sometimes Marie-Bulimie, sometimes Marie-Nicorette, Marie-Clamydie…
Reita Lounatvuori’s Finnish translation has insightful updates that modernize the old comedy just right. When the basic style and atmosphere of comedy are from a hundred years ago, but the dialogue and morals have a touch of the 2000s, there are nice collisions.