Review: Isä
Our Father who wanders somewhere out there, in the valley of deepening shadows
Helsinki City Theatre has made a strong interpretation of Florian Zeller’s successful play.
The Father by the Frenchman Florian Zeller is a brilliant play text. Zeller’s story about the life of a person with a memory disorder is accurate, believable and touching.
Zeller’s play tells the story of the last years of a person who may be very close to the author, when a slowly progressing memory disorder turns their life unpredictable and chaotic.
And the play is not just the story of one family. The play tackles directly the fundamental questions of our worldview. The question is, what is reality?
At least for me, the Helsinki City Theatre’s interpretation of Zeller’s play forced me to think about the nature of reality from the very first minutes.
The self of each of us is created through a very complex process. We are more than just the sum of our experiences. Not only influences and experiences from the outside, but also biology, information from inside the body, pushes us from the cradle to the grave. However, our worldview is quite literally a picture of reality created by the brain and of course an ever-changing image of reality.
When a memory disorder strikes, our illusion of the nature of reality crumbles. Cause and effect start to throw. Zeller aptly describes this by raising the clock as one of the central symbols of the play.
Wikipedia defines Zeller as a postmodernist. How is that? Zeller was born in 1979. This young man’s name is worth remembering. We will hear more about him.
The value of Zeller’s text has been understood at the Helsinki City Theatre, and the theatre puts its best foot forward on stage. Reita Lounatvuori has translated the play with reverence, and Milko Lehto’s direction is exemplary in its direction.
Lounatvuori has not only translated Zeller’s play, but he has translated it into Finnish. The familiarity of the text, the feeling that I have experienced this myself, was startlingly strong. In Lehto’s direction, the timing of the scenes was really right.
Janne Siltavuori’s set design is insightful. At least I can imagine how a memory disorder gradually isolates us from our loved ones like glass walls.
At the heart of the Helsinki City Theatre’s play is Jari Pehkonen’s amazing performance as a father with a memory disorder. Pehkonen empathizes with the anxiety of a man with a memory disorder in a heart-wrenching way.
Vuokko Huovatta shines as a daughter who sacrificially cares for her father. The dialogue between the two was like straight from real life.
It says something about the impact of the play that quite a few of us cried openly at the end of the play. I’m sure many viewers had first-hand experiences of the human tragedy depicted in the play.
Theatre lovers have also noticed the quality of Zeller’s play. Last Friday, the auditorium on the Pasila stage was almost sold out. The Helsinki City Theatre’s repertoire has often been criticised for being too entertaining. However, there are also real gems in the repertoire all the time, such as General and Casanova and Taju.
In South Karelia, more and more people are also likely to have to face the tragedy described in the play, either as a victim of a slowly progressing memory disorder or as a relative of a person with a memory disorder. More than one in four of the population of South Karelia has already reached the age of 65.
Would the Lappeenranta City Theatre have the courage and wisdom to tackle such a topical and brilliantly written play?