Review: Ministeriä viedään

On Wednesday, I got to experience the premiere frenzy on the Arena stage of the Helsinki City Theatre when British-Finnish director Neil Hardwick’s new farce The Minister Is Taken premiered. The room was full, and the theatre was filled with happy chatter and an expectant atmosphere.

Ray Cooney’s The Minister Is Taken is a hilarious farce that has been updated to tell the story of post-election Finland, where the love-hungry minister Viljanen (Esko Roine) is in the middle of a relationship soup he has cooked himself. The minister has left Toijala for the capital, for a parliamentary meeting, and has taken his wife with him so that she can spend quality time alone. The minister’s lively wife (Heidi Herala) needs a little buzz in her relationship, but the minister himself has caught the eye of the Prime Minister’s glowing special adviser (Sari Siikander). Minister Viljanen makes his own special adviser Mika Pöntinen (Asko Sarkola) take care of his own dirty chores, such as lying to his wife and booking an extra hotel room. However, the plans are thwarted right from the start when the minister’s wife catches Mika’s eye.

Poor Mika flits between hotel rooms and tries to cover up the minister’s and his wife’s escapades, which he seems to be unwittingly involved in. The situation is not helped by the sharp-eyed hotel waiter (Santeri Kinnunen), the opposition MP Liselotte Walli-Lesonen (Eija Vilpas), who is working on a bill to completely ban the purchase of sex, or the zealous hotel manager (Eero Saarinen). When the husband of Minister Viljanen’s secret lover (Eppu Salminen) arrives, it is only a matter of time before he is revealed.

The Minister Is Taken is a fast-paced farce in which lies are churned out almost at the speed of light. The fast-paced performance almost starts to take your breath away as the viewer tries to keep up with the twists and turns of relationships, while the web of lies expands more and more. Santeri Kinnunen’s sharp-eyed opportunist-waiter is uncontrollably funny, and Asko Sarkola captivates as a timid special adviser to the minister. You can’t help but become attached to the character of Special Adviser Mika; Over the course of the story, the quiet Mika develops into a witty and gutsy man who has learned to lie like a politician! 🙂 The determination of the minister’s wife, played by Heidi Herala, to get a buzz between the sheets is fun to watch. The farce is very topical and the characters’ role models are easy to guess – topicality makes the mess even more entertaining! I recommend it – you can laugh here!

Special mention for the ingenious handbook, namely the Ilta-Sutinat magazine printed in the form of a tabloid!

Thank you for a fun theatre evening to the Helsinki City Theatre! 🙂

Cheers, Dad