Review: Venus turkiksissa

The reign of men is over

David Ives’ Venus in Fur will finally have its premiere in Finland. The play itself is almost ingenious: it plays between theatre and reality, and the roles change at best without even noticing it.

Venus in Fur is always an ambitious project, whether it’s Roman Polanski’s 2013 film direction or the Helsinki City Theatre’s performance of Venus in Furs. There are several different factors that make it challenging. The first of these is the script. It travels on many different levels, mixing fact and fiction.

This is not enough, as the text also mixes up the characters, at best seamlessly and in the end more often than their heads. There are only two actors in the play, but there are several people and roles on stage. The great Sampo Sarkola and Armi Toivanen give their all in the performance, and I believe that anyone who understands something about theatre will also see it. The characters were just the right caricature – in the nature of the play.

Sarkola’s covertly chauvinistic, even pathetic writer-director underestimates Toivanen’s actress, who manages to dig out the man’s true character to the very core in this less than two-hour performance. The play is built ingeniously, but it must also be able to carry it. The text and actors alone are not enough.

At the helm, Hilkka-Liisa Iivanainen makes even exciting decisions at times. And I can’t think of a better stage for this work than the challenging stage on Pengerkatu.

The translation works, but there may also be a small problem. I’m not sure how well this works in Finnish. However, I can’t address this right now, because it would require either reading the play or watching it again. It may be that the sometimes very bombastic lines don’t quite fall into place, but that’s just a small side issue.

Venus in Furs is a very topical play. Many theatre lovers have probably read, for example, Elina Knihtilä’s excellent interview in the monthly supplement of Helsingin Sanomat about the status of women in theatre and film. This play is just that. This play is also about how Finland’s independence is celebrated in a very largely masculine atmosphere, with unknown wars and seven brotherhoods. The best and most pleasant thing about this is that, in my opinion, the change has already begun.

I want to dedicate the last paragraph of this blog post to Helsingin Sanomat. It was amusing to read your so-called. criticism of this proposal as well. At least it showed that the critic had clearly not really understood anything. Isn’t the critic’s first step to understand the work before it can be condemned? However, I was very pleased. In spite of everything, you had given the proposal the highest possible value: ★ .

It’s a big deal to compare the play to David Bowie’s last album. Despite the fact that no one has taken your theatre criticism seriously for a long time. You could even point out in the spirit of your article: The critic paces his criticism only with the jokes he makes, which feels like just an embarrassing icing on the cake.