Review: Vaarallisia suhteita
Riitta Havukainen and Merja Larivaara are a wonderful duo in the twists and turns of relationships and intrigue
The first stage image: sets are being erected. The last stage image: the sets begin to be dismantled. Between the beginning and the end, there are almost two hours and fifty minutes of intrigue, power struggles and weakness of the flesh. Or is it weakness that Jesus is possessed by love and slandered as he prepares for his role, forced into celibacy?
Helsinki City Theatre’s Dangerous Relationships is an absurd and exhilarating performance, which in many ways is also provocative. It is inevitably comical, but also a tragic story about what people are ready for because of their love and status.
On the stage of Studio Pasila, Jesus gets a horrible stance (why wouldn’t he have?), the Teflon shell of a “civil servant actor” and occupational safety opinions collapse into falling in love, and none of the characters in the play is free from emotional storms.
The adaptation by Leea Klemola and Rosa-Maria Perä retains the plot twists of the original play. The original dates back as far as an epistolary novel published in 1782. Christopher Hampton made a play about it in 1985. Many people remember the blockbuster film Lies and Temptresses (starring Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer, John Malkovich and Uma Thurman, among others), based on the play.
Director Anna-Elina Lyytikäinen has managed to get a real theatrical play out of her ensemble, a story whose events take place in the theatre. The comparison is lame, but another theatrical play from 1990 that raised a hurricane in my mind inevitably came to mind. The play was Jouko Turkka’s Lieson the small stage of the Finnish National Theatre.
Theatre play is made possible by Klemola’s language alone and apt insights such as “Satan’s ninth-generation feminist, nothing but ass and boobs”, which Riitta Havukainen, who plays the old director Raili Wahlman, slaps at Sari Haapamäki, dressed in a miniskirt and an open blouse. Haapamäki is Pamela Mårtensån, a teacher of expressive arts, who is trying to prepare Jesus for her role.
The play’s strong duo is Riitta Havukainen and Merja Larivaara, who plays the theatre director Ritva Mertanen. Havukainen’s character is an unruly and uninhibited older woman, and there is something in the interpretation that is completely uninhibited. Merja Larivaara is a theatre director who holds on to her dignity, although she is also tough in her mouth. It feels like both actors just get better over the years.
Underneath the power struggle between the leader and the director lies their deep attachment to each other. Will the dream of a shared senior apartment ever succeed?
Antti Virmavirta, The “civil servant actor” Rauno de Tourvell gets his real star moment at the end of the play in the role of Satan, and Mikko Virtanen as the celibate Jesus is already top notch as a physical performance. Pertti Koivula is director Keke Wahlman, who suffers from back pain and has to struggle with his mother, who is a director who is famous for her condition. Eija Vilpas and Juha Jokela complete the group in their own roles.
Anna-Elina Lyytikäinen’s great directorial insight and changes in the level of the performance is that in the midst of all the commotion and swearing, enchantingly beautiful classical music sometimes plays.