Review: Shopping & Fucking

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Not just shock treatment

Helsinki City Theatre has caused a stir in advance with its premiere of Shopping & Fucking by warning the audience in advance about the harshness of the play’s subject matter and language. At the same time, expectations have been created that may even be impossible for the performance to meet. What will shock us with? How tough is the tough one at the Helsinki City Theatre?
   Outside the institutional theatre, performed by an independent group in some basement space less like a theatre, Mark Ravenhill’s play would be closer to the reality it depicts. That would certainly contribute to the credibility of the work. Perhaps we could better forget that we are watching a play that is being performed in a theatre.
   But on the other hand, where and why this need to kick against the facts: Shopping & Fucking IS a play and it is performed in a theater.
   In any case, the most important thing is that it is performed, because Shopping & Fucking is a good play whose raison d’être is the desire to deal with difficult issues, not the desire to shock with them. It is also a mostly skillfully written layered play, the analysis of which extends beyond its description of time and people. It is not content with stating, but also asks why.
   In the history of drama, Shopping & Fucking is related to, for example, Maxim Gorky’s play At the Bottom , nowadays the direction of the social hierarchy is only described with a horizontal instead of a vertical; Instead of the bottom, we are on the periphery, marginalized. Conceptually, does it perhaps also mean that there is no end point in sight for the negative development, that the disadvantaged can distance themselves from the well-off indefinitely?

Fathers, sons and
Market forces

   In the Shopping & Fucking guide, Maarit Ruikka moves in her own area, in the current crisis of values. The characters in the play mostly live below the subsistence level, and survival tactics turn familiar value systems upside down. They live in a world where sex and drugs are the real merchandise, giving away ecstasy buttons for free is the only possible expression of humanism. What do they have left to maintain the meaning of life?
   All the sexual relations in the play are homosexual, and the essential question is whether they are personal or business. Progress has been made towards equality: people become objectified regardless of gender. According to the therapist, business relationships are healthier for a person with an addiction problem, because they do not lead to codependency.
   The actors are facing a tough time at the City Theatre as they have to swim into the world of extremes of their characters. Dismantling protective equipment and surrendering to situations becomes the most critical point of implementation.
   It seems to cause the least problems for the greenest of the team, Riku Kemppinen, who is visiting from the theatre school, and whose portrayal of an underage boy prostitute is very easily and genuinely broken and carried away by his traumas.
   Mika Nuojua and Oskari Katajisto also get very close to people. However, difficulties arise with the level of storytelling, which stands out from the play as a whole and has a slightly theoretical flavor. Mark, who is struggling with withdrawal symptoms at Katajisto, has excellent physical expression, but there is an alienating inhibition between thought and speech that makes speech replicate.
   Of course, there is also a woman in men’s lives, but no one’s lover, neither mother nor daughter. Marika Parkkomäki seems to have trouble portraying this Lulu, an actress who steals from shops for the rest of her life, who on the one hand realizes some things with piercing clarity, but on the other hand is incomprehensibly helpless, dependent and often seems completely infantile.
   She is a confusing figure: the modern-day Virgin Mary, whose existence is reduced to worrying in a world where some fathers sacrifice their sons on the altar of violence, while others want to sacrifice the rest of the world for the success of their own son.
   Pekka Huotari makes an unexplained boss who unscrupulously rewrites the opening sentences of the Bible to suit the highest powers of the market.

Precise controls
Power

   Ruikka has a good command of the theatre’s range of means, and sound and light technology play a significant role in creating the world of the play on stage. Eradz Nazimov cuts the scenes precisely with sound effects that hit the border between efficiency and tolerability, which are also cut so violently that you can hear the silence. Mika Ijäs’s lighting design loads the scenes with meanings that extend beyond naturalism and sometimes creates stunningly beautiful light situations.
   The stage design built by Oskari Torvinen is both barren and at the same time warm and aesthetic with its red bricks. And most importantly, it structures the space so that the venues stand out from each other, but do not get spatially out of the center.

OUTI LAHTINEN

 Mark Ravenhill: Shopping & Fucking, translated by Jusa Peltoniemi, directed by Maarit Ruikka, set design by Oskari Torvinen, costumes by Sari Salmela, lighting design by Mika Ijäs, sound design by Eradz Nazimov. Finnish premiere on the small stage of the Helsinki City Theatre on 15 February 2000.