Review: Hitchcock ja blondi

El bimbo is just a man

The Englishman Terry Johnson’s Hitchcock and the Blonde is a wonderful text. It’s sparklingly intelligent, uncontrollably funny, and extremely profound – all of it.
In his play, Johnson reflects on the deepest essence of art and male power. For Hitchcock in the play, the suicide of a young woman has become an obsession that defines his entire career as an artist. Alex, who studies Hitchcock’s films in the present day, is obsessed with seducing young college girls.

In this way, Johnson’s text also grows into a strong morality. What may be great and sublime in art can also be flattened into very small and low. It depends entirely on the angle of view. The question is, what exactly is the reason for the misogyny that plagues the world from one century to the next?
For decades, Neil Hardwick has been a bridge-builder between English and Finnish culture. Hardwick, if anyone, also understands what a tricky text Johnson’s Hitchcock and the Blonde is on the Finnish stage.

It’s a question of nuances. For example, private and public nudity is not quite the same thing for us Sauna Finns as it is for the English, who will apparently forever live in the golden age of Queen Victoria and the empire.
Statistically, we Finns are also at least as life-threatening company for our loved ones as the English. However, Jack the Ripper’s surgeon’s knife or other subtleties of sadism are not used. The sharpest edge of Finnish violent entertainment is represented by the Swedish Mora knife.

I think Hardwick solves these puzzles masterfully. The steering is airy. Hardwick leaves us viewers with a Häme gene time and space to realize the true side of the story. You can also feel the techniques of the master of timing from the fact that there are many places for explosive laughter in the performance.
Hitchcock and Blonde is played breathtakingly magnificently. The erotic charge of the play is not created by nudity, but by the fact that Sanna-June Hyde as Nicolana as a student girl and Mari Perankoski as Hitchcock’s blonde put themselves on the line in an absolutely amazing way.

The scene where a naked Perankoski carries Kari Mattila , wrapped in a slippery plastic raincoat, on his back to the stage is surely an absolutely incredible thing as a purely physical performance. It requires the resources of a female tiger.