Review: Kiviä taskussa

Acting of the best kind

Marie Jones: Stones in His Pockets. Finnish translation: Henri Kapulainen. Director: Pentti Kotkaniemi. Set design and costumes: Jyrki Seppä. Sound: Ari-Pekka Saarikko. Lighting: Teppo Saarinen. Cast: Mika Nuojua and Martti Suosalo. Performances at the Helsinki City Theatre’s Studio Pasila stage.

It is said that Northern Irish playwright Marie Jones was a troublemaker at school. Instead of detention, the teacher came up with the ingenious idea of sending her to the school’s theater club, and that’s how she became.

Jones’ plays are really theater, few playwrights have such a strong feeling that it is just for the stage, for the actors, that the text is written. In the play Stones in the Pocket, two actors play fifteen roles and the two actors get to use the entire register of acting. Not only do they play different roles, but the roles also move on different levels of fiction.

The guys Charlie and Jake, somewhere in an impoverished Irish countryside, are the two basic roles that the other roles revolve around. A film shoot in which Charlie and Jake are assistants becomes a way to fantasize away from reality and to make a fantasy about the film’s fantasy, where the audience is given the role of fictional extras or filmmakers while the two actors act as directors.

Stones in the Pocket was brilliantly made by Sampo Sarkola and Pekka Strang on the Swedish Theatre’s mini-stage a year ago. When the Helsinki City Theatre stages the same text in Finnish, the comparison is inevitable, but it turns out to be meaningless. Martti Suosalo and Mika Nuojua, furiously skilfully directed by Pentti Kotkaniemi, offer the best kind of acting, as did Sarkola and Strang.

Suosalo and Nuojua draw from the sources of comedy and switch from one role to another in a fraction of a second. Nuojua parodies the made-up superficiality of the film world in a rather sarcastic but also tender way, while Suosalo is more of a kind of peasant type with his feet on the ground and with a wonderful scale of humour, self-irony and human emotions.

The comedy is in high gear and that is also the only thing that can be objected to this exuberantly spiritual production of Stones in the Pocket. When the other bases of the play are about to emerge, it is too late to change gears. The guy who went out into the lake with stones in his pocket and the biting question of how innocent the idolized film industry ultimately is glides by as serious food for thought as the somewhat twisted grip has already become self-propelled. Perhaps there are too many of these ready-to-take scenes. Two and a half hours is the longest and with a few strokes a superb work could be perfected.

The comedy and tragedy in this multi-layered theatrical performance are redemptive. It’s not Hollywood but the cows that give the boys a life. It’s possible to live in the countryside, hooray!