Review: Kohtauksia eräästä avioerosta

A SAD BREAKUP TWICE

The life of an Australian couple opens up on the stage of the City Theatre gradually and civilly. In the laughter of the audience, you can hear personal recognition. However, the play Scenes from a Divorce, directed by Frej Lindqvist, soon silences the viewer: This is exactly what often happens when tiredness, distancing and rejection take over, deliberate insults strike and regaining one’s own life is far away. Eventually, the hope of change flickers barely anymore, and it doesn’t take much for the wife to pack the husband’s suitcase.


The play, co-written by Andrew Bowell and Hannie Rayson, offers an interesting and rare double exposure. The man writes the man’s version of what happened, the woman tells the same story from the woman’s point of view. The scenes are partly identical, but their experiences and emotions are different. Forgetfulness says a lot. The solution prolongs the play, but the difference in experiences keeps the play alive. There is a lot of talk in the play, but it hits the mark often enough and aptly.
Bowell and Rayson have been able to make their characters multifaceted and sympathetic. In Rayson’s part, the feelings get more depth, but it doesn’t necessarily happen only for the wife’s benefit. What makes the story tragic is the longing and hope for a new beginning, expressed by the spouses alone. Realism is that it is not easy to talk about the past or start a new one.


Carl-Kristian Rundman’s Mathew is a publisher dedicated to his work, uploading to the familiar and safe, arousing compassion in his confusion. Jonna Järnefeltin Tina is a wife who has been searching for herself for a long time, at first coolly cautious, but in the second part she deepens her character. Mathew’s mother Margaret (Leena Uotila), who has seen Mathew’s life, makes delicious remarks about men, and Tina’s single sister Sarah (Anitta Niemi) doesn’t understand why her sister wants to let go of what she has never had. The couple’s problems also affect them.
That’s how it goes in real life, too: Marriage is not a two-way street, but comes with the family of both with its secrets. And when you get divorced, bystanders also take a stand on the divorce.

The real catalyst is Laurie Clifford, played by Pekka Laiho , a politician whose biography Tina is writing. He gives Tina welcome sympathy, but also a great disappointment: He, too, assumes that a woman is not able to make her decisions just for her own sake.
Anyone who can bear to look at the fragments of the past long enough learns a lot about themselves. Tina wants to at least try – alone.