Review: Venus turkiksissa

Hupako hatches into a daredevil – Armi Toivanen shines in her raucous stage role

The performance can’t be bad if it increases its intensity from about four minutes to the final eclipse.

Hilkka-Liisa Iivanainen’s direction “Venus in Furs” is one of them. So good. The best that the Helsinki City Theatre has offered in its programme for the current year (August-May).

The basis of the play, written by David Ives in 2010, is multi-layered. The protagonist is playwright Thomas Novachek, who has decided to direct his new text, which is inspired by the Austrian Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch’s short story “Venus im pelz”. When it was published in the late 1880s, the book aroused widespread disgust and fear. No wonder at the time, because at the center of the story was a man eager to be enslaved by a woman and, on the side, her fetishistic relationship with furs. Two sexual preferences classified as perversion at the time in one fell swoop, not bad. (It is not for nothing that the last part of the author’s surname remained in the dictionary of history: over time, “masochism” has become an everyday language when it means all kinds of enjoyment, even figuratively, of hurting or humiliating oneself.)

Thomas has also instilled in the female protagonist of his play, Wanda, the characteristics of the ancient goddess of love and sexuality, Aphrodite, whose counterpart in the Roman god groups was Venus. As the male protagonist of his play, he has written, not so surprisingly, a playwright with both masochistic and fetishistic tendencies.

A fate called Vanda

At the end of the audition for the casting of the play, one more latecomer rushes to the theatre and begs to show off his skills. Mimmi, whose name happens to be Vanda, feels like a complete bimbo at first, both to Thomas and to those sitting in the casting area on Pengerkatu, but let it go when she starts to let out a blurb.

The rounds of Iivanainen’s tenacious steering start to grow the second Vanda is afraid to force herself into Wanda’s role. The innocent dialogue training first turns into flirting, then into an increasingly open erotic courtship dance, which takes on the character of a power game at an accelerating pace towards the end. The oppressed creeps into the role of the oppressor as if unnoticed. The director becomes guided, humiliated, and at least mostly of his own volition.

As a viewer, one can of course ask how Thomas does not notice how purposefully, albeit with a hint, Vanda twists the power figure into a new position. Does it happen that she has costumes and props suitable for the play’s dominatrix Wanda in her bag? Is it her natural talent that she takes over the role of Wanda both expressively and internally from the first test line?

There is no such coincidence, we know it all the time in the stands. However, we don’t necessarily know how serious Vantaa is in the first place. Did he just come to play a little at Thomas’s expense, or does he have more far-reaching goals in terms of power relations between men and women? Towards the end, Vanda fires quite an analysis of Thomas’s play and male hegemony in the writer’s face, but does she do it as herself, or as Wanda, or even in the role of a goddess?

Layers to peel

Vanda is supposedly a delicious actress. You can play many roles inside each other in the character: an insecure actor who wants to play a strong female character who covets the role of a goddess.

Armi Toivanen is at home in the character of the multifaceted Vanda and Wanda. He skilfully peels the layers of the character like a Kinder egg, at the heart of which awaits a surprise – which, to be honest, may not be such a big surprise after all, but the end result of an inevitability. Toivanen is endearingly funny in the beginning as a goofy actor who whines to try his wings, and whose abilities Thomas doesn’t believe in one bit. And soon the writer-director is already faced with a rage, who subdues the man under her stiletto heeled boots. All that’s missing is the Rollars’ “Under My Thumb” playing in the background, and the power of gender roles would be perfect.

Sampo Sarkola, who plays Thomas, is a good counterpart to Toivanen, who sparks and eventually bursts into flames. Reaching the psyche of a humiliated man may not be possible with a snap of the fingers. Thomas struggles to transform into a character he has written, but can’t help it. It’s great to follow the struggle that Sarkola portrays physically, knowing that this is just theatre…

Sarkola and Toivanen met for the first time on stage in Lillan in 2007 in Oscar Wilde’s play “Why Do Women Always Fall in Love with Ernest?” They were wonderful even then, albeit in a completely different, whiter and more innocent story.

At the time, Toivanen was still in the process of completing a theatre school. I immediately believed that we would hear from him again.

We heard a lot, but at that first sighting, I didn’t think that he would be the winner of a sketch character competition that the whole nation is a fan of. Of course, the Herppeenluoma characters or the mildly written film roles do not give a full picture of Toivanen’s abilities. It’s best to see him on the stage of a theatre, where he’s always flared up when I’ve rarely seen him. I wish I would stay there.