Review: Isä

Florian Zeller’s The Father is experienced at Studio Pasila. The premiere on 19 January took us on stage to the Father’s Sphere, where the corners of memory and amnesia are experienced, the impossible is recognised. The father, Jari Pehkonen , built a living face for a person with a memory disorder and his daughter Vuokko Hovatta for a caregiver.

The father was directed by Milka Lehto, and he directed well. Author Florian Zeller’s message about the environment of a person with a memory disorder, which has spread around the world, was given an evocative version in Pasila. The elements surrounding the person with a memory disorder, i.e. family, caregivers, reality and false reality, everyday activities, are mixed realistically, and in the play you “get” to see how the world of the person with a memory disorder takes shape with its changing realities.

In The Father, Jari Pehkonen makes an incredible journey to the spider-like brain, one could say to the stratosphere, where it is impossible to follow someone who knows his memory. Overlapping memories and memory traces appear on the stage in Pehkonen’s facial expressions and gestures, in his entire being. That a sick person can be sensitive in many ways and suddenly feel and wise. And everything disappears in an instant.

The staging supports brain movement. There is a home, there is a shattered image of a deceased daughter, there are nurses and a care institution, and there are members of one’s own family with changing roles. The simple, complex environment created by Janne Siltavuori makes you think. There is costume designer Riitta Anttonen-Palo’s changing clothes mixing reality. Where is the time?

Reita Lounavuori , who translated Le Pére into Finnish, has created an expressive world of language that underlines nothing. The result is a fluent speech that naturally follows the events. 

The father’s daughter Anne, alias Vuokko Hovatta, gives a face to a relative who has to wrestle with her own life, family and love of duty. When is THAT moment? The father lives in the family, eats, looks for his things, sets the pace of life. A spouse, son-in-law suffers and is an obvious indicator that determines when one’s own care changes.

The relatives of a person with a memory disorder are constantly considering whether to maintain reality or join the memory world of the person with a memory disorder. In everyday life, the answer for many is certainly reality. Yes, but what happens then! Vuokko Hovatta lives right here and does everything she can to maintain reality, showing the pain and anxiety when one person is not enough. Spouse Patrik aka Heikki Sankari brings the edges of the situation to reality. .

Is the Father distressing to experience? No, it is not. When you look for the whole, i.e. the truth, from reality, the result is rarely distressing. There is humor in truths, light in the shadows, and so it is in the Father. The life of a person with a memory disorder with its memories extends far away, it has perspective, just like  a healthy person.

We can only praise Florian Zeller’s edgy Father character and Jari Pehkonen’s and Vuokko Hovatta’s duet, which creates prisms of past life.

So you are allowed to laugh in the play, but with a tear in your eye! You can laugh in life too.

PS. The transformation of the brain into a white wilderness at the end of the play is memorable. Insight from insight.