Review: Shopping & Fucking
No longer “God created” but “take the money first”
Mark Ravenhill’s controversial play met with the favor of the audience at the Helsinki City Theatre
Mark Ravenhill: Shopping and Fucking. Helsinki City Theatre, small stage. Translated by Jusa Peltoniemi, directed by Maarit Ruikka, set design by Oskari Torvinen, costumes by Sari Salmela, lighting by Nika Ijäs, sound by Eradz Nazimov. Cast: Oskari Katajisto, Marika Parkkomäki, Mika Nuojua, Pekka Huotari, Riku Kemppinen.
The audience at the Helsinki City Theatre had arrived at the premiere of the controversial play despite warnings.
Not for children, not for believers or the sensitive, the City Theatre’s press service escorted Mark Ravenhill’s play Shopping and Fucking, Shopping and Naiskentelua to a Finnish perspective.
Of course, the worldview that serves up homosexuals and drug addicts is quite harsh to see and hear, even in Jusa Peltoniemi’s translation, but perhaps it is no longer as sensational as has been thought. After all, we have already seen everything, thanks also to television.
At least from the premiere audience, the performance directed by Maarit Ruikka attracted liberal interest, which is also due to the interpretation itself and some of its basic solutions. Maarit Ruikka alleviates a possible shock or presumed anxiety by clearly making theatre. In other words, there have been harsher and even harsher interpretations of the play Shopping and Fucking.
Theatricality already begins From the overview created by Oskari Torvinen. The brick walls are clearly made of plastic, the platforms are humming. Despite the crumbs of the food, the house-clean landscape is clearly from the set design.
And the actors act, some better, some excellently and some too one-sided, ending up with a lot of roaring and screaming. So in this sense, too, we are in the theatre.
Nothing of the text is left unseen or done, but probably the softened tone of the interpretation helps the viewer to find more general content than some special areas of sex in Ravenhill’s rather chaotic but voluptuous contemporary account. All in all, the book hits its fork on much more succulent meat than just anal sex or drug shenanigans.
A new beginning is written in the Bible. No longer “God created in the beginning”, but “Take the money first”, the father has advised his son, who ends up as a drug dealer. And the boy continues: “Money brings education. Civilization brings money.” The television takes care of the rest of the needs.
Whoever does not understand this new gospel belongs mercilessly among those who fall.
In a nutshell, it is the world of the play Shopping and Fucking. Its terms and conditions must be clarified. The vicious cycle of selling and buying keeps us afloat. You have to learn the morality of mammon. That is: absolutely everything in this world is for sale, there are also buyers for absolutely everything.
The colourful story is about a drug dealer and four adult young people, one woman and three men.
One is currently breaking free from drugs, two are selling them, and in order to save themselves from debt punishment, they are also saving themselves in the tailwind of phone sex. The fourth shipwrecked man is looking for himself in the man of his dreams, a dream that will never come true.
They are friends, each loving in their own way, but the new rules of the game in the new world are throwing them from the bottom to despair. The end of the play, and especially the interpretation, is somehow conciliatory, but probably not final even for the end of this story. At least one game is played during the story to a masochistic and cruel ending.
Oskari Katajisto is handsomely sensitive, vulnerable, loving and much more in the role of Mark, who is weaning off drugs. He has exactly the energy of decadence and striving that the story needs to move forward and be interesting. And there is also charisma, the crucial basic nourishment of an actor, without which nothing will come of anything.
In Shopping and Fucking, Mika Nuojua also makes his Mark-loving Robbie a character who exudes both vulnerability and the power it brings, and who is also given the obligations of comedy on his shoulders. Nuoju will survive and he will also be interested. Except when the expression is just roaring.
Marika Parkkomäki’s role as Lulu in this drama depicting love between men is quite difficult. The result is somewhat pretentious, especially in the beginning, and Parkkomäki roars, but in her pain points, her Lulu is touchingly lonely, lost just like the others.
Riku Kemppinen replies as Gary in a narrow and monotonous way, but brings a palpable humanity to the interpretation.
Pekka Huotari turns a drug dealer who preaches the connection between money and education into a caricature, but aptly horrible and frightening.
I take my hat off to the whole team for wanting to venture into the jungle of many kinds of people and many different wills. That’s what Shopping and Fucking is about on the level of its plot and characters. With this theme, the performance will inevitably move the viewer’s tolerance meter to a new position, and that is what the City Theatre is all about.
Now it’s time for the viewers’ answer. Do we dare? At the premiere, the audience dared.