Review: Viivi ja Wagner

Familiar characters jumped from the comic strip screens onto the stage

VIIVI AND WAGNER ENCHANT IN THE THEATRE AS WELL

Transferring a comic strip to the stage of a theatre is a challenging task. However, when the text of the play is written by the creator of the characters, Juba Tuomola, the end result is quite successful.

The stage of Teatteristudio Pasila in Helsinki is divided into three parts by partition walls: the kitchen, the living room and the bedroom, where Viivi (Sari Siikander) and Wagner (Risto Kaskilahti) take turns adventuring. On the other hand, the bottomlessly lazy Wagner mostly enjoys sitting on the pink sofa in the living room. The black-and-white simplicity of the comic strip has probably been sought by staging the rooms in pink throughout.

Those who follow the newspapers can read glimpses of humour from the couple’s everyday life. A two-hour theatrical performance, on the other hand, requires a more elaborate plot. Otherwise, there is a risk that the performance will disintegrate into detached sketch pieces that will not be able to entertain the whole evening.

Viivi and Wagner’s theatrical performance is framed by a Sunday that Wagner would have liked to spend just lounging on the couch, while Viivi announced that she had already invited her parents to dinner. The theatre performance skilfully combines the couple’s everyday bickering with two more advanced stories. The first of these, in which the devil himself appears at the couple’s door and manages to buy Wagner’s soul for twenty euros, remains unfinished and quite detached from the point of view of the whole. Instead, a successful story set on stage with its many twists and turns is a dinner visit by Viivi’s parents, which eventually also gets Viivi’s grandmother, as well as the haughty Uncle Julli and Aunt Fylli. The multi-threaded family drama is complete when conflicts and previously unheard secrets come to the surface.

Comic Book Sounds
Included

In Viivi and Wagner, the performances of the actors are quite successful, which is especially important for the main actors when it comes to a comic that everyone is familiar with. In addition to Siikander and Kaskilahti, Pia Runnakko also plays the role of the grandmother particularly well.

In comics, when the sounds outside the speech bubbles are written in the boxes (Raaps! Röyh! Bzzz!), on stage Wagner produces his own burps, while many creaks and creaks come at the right time from the tape.
Viivi and Wagner’s relationship in the theatre appears largely the same as in the comics. Despite the constant bickering and very different lifestyles, there is still something that binds this couple and keeps them together. Every couple who has come to the theatre is sure to find something familiar about the relationship between Viivi and Wagner. There is so much dialogue in a two-hour theatre performance.