Review: Henki

– –

In the face of death, not even intellect helps

Tapio Vanhatalo
Eeva-Liisa Haimelin and Miitta Sorvali in the play Spirit.

Margaret Edson’s play The Spirit (Wit) has certainly earned all the awards it has received, including the Dramatists Guild and Pulizer awards. The play tells the story of a professor of poetry who has dedicated his life to research becoming an object of research himself, turning into the ovaries and abdominal cavity, which serve as a breeding ground for widespread cancer.
   Research and the vocation of a researcher, as well as the encounter between illness and inevitable death, are the central themes of the play, and as a result, the overall tone of the work is exceptionally unemotional. Not cold, however, but intellectual, focused and thoughtful.
   I would like to call the main role of the play a downright modern, female King Lear. Firstly, because of the lonely greatness with which the role dominates the play, secondly, because of the magnitude of the renunciation, weakness, mortality, surrender and loneliness that the protagonist has to face and accept.
   The third reason is the extremely subtle, mostly understatement-like criticism or questioning with which the play relates to the current, Western values centered on research and specialization.

Impressive
Silences

   If Edson’s play does not succumb to sentimentality, neither does Milko Lehto’s performance directed by Milko Lehto for the small stage of the Helsinki City Theatre.
   The most impressive thing about the performance directed by Lehto are the pauses, the long, bold silences that give the theme of the play time to sink to the bottom of the viewer’s mind.
   Miitta Sorval’s handsome performance in the lead role does not leave room for empathetic identification, but opens the guards of a professor with his tight armour, immersed in the questions of life and death of 17th-century poetry, only to the extent necessary. Known as a ruthless teacher and a strict researcher, the woman is not sympathetic even on her sickbed.
   However, the armor is filled with skilfully dosed fractures, and the way in which the objects of study that fascinated the researcher’s own mind, the poet John Donne’s verses on the border between life and death, become reality is both interesting and shocking in Sorval’s performance.

Useless
Lightening

   However, I am not entirely convinced that the comic stylisation methods introduced by Sorvali at certain points, such as those familiar from Pirkko Harrison in Iltalypsy – the emphasis on the “civilised” “civilised” “s” hissing in the lower teeth and the emphasis on syllable endings – are the right way to lighten the heavy subject of the play.
   As Vivian Bearing, Sorval could have afforded to give up her trademarks, as her mental strength and charisma would have been enough to support the play as it was.
   On the other hand, a play with a magnificent structure does not even need external lightening, but lightens itself. Humor already exists in the protagonist’s intelligent sarcasm and does not need a separate comic expression to emerge.
   The spirit also features other excellent roles, in which the acting’s work disappears from sight and the central content of the subject emerges. Hannu Lauri is a very convincing chief physician in his simplicity, and Kristo Salminen succeeds in his assistant physician in drawing a picture of the sincere and all-consuming enthusiasm of a research-oriented young person.
   Petriikka Pohjanheimo’s nurse Susie is a wonderfully and truly present warm and soft point in the play, a human touch.
   Oskari Torvinen’s set design forms as visually pleasing a hospital environment as can be imagined without detaching itself from the frame of a realistic stage image. The hygiene of the white hospital gowns is softened by warm tones and translucent wall surfaces.

OUTI LAHTINEN

 Margaret Edson: The Spirit. Helsinki City Theatre, directed by Milko Lehto, set design by Oskari Torvinen, costumes by Maija Pekkanen, lighting design by Mis Ijäs, sound by Kirsi Peteri. Nordic premiere 29.3.