Review: Fanny ja Alexander

Perfect theatre

Helsinki City Theatre’s Fanny and Alexander has it all. Theatre at its best. Storytelling, childhood magic, the magic and magic of theatre, carnival, imagination and madness, ghosts and other oddities, the revelation of secrets, the greatness of acting and, as the poster of the play says, powerful life force.

This play by Ingmar Bergman is great and powerful, both mentally and physically. It’s like a huge fresco or mural. As Paavo Westerberg , who directed the play, aptly says in the script, “this work celebrates the existence of theatre, imagination, actors and the stage. Fanny and Alexander want to say that the power of imagination is limitless, and if a person focuses more on light than darkness in himself and others, it is possible for all of us to be saved.”

Over the past ten years, Westerberg has become one of Finland’s top directors. The very beginning of this play is the genius of director and set designer Antti Mattila. On the revolving stage, the characters are introduced, not by listing them in any way, but by showing the Ekdahl family’s preparations for Christmas night. No one is talking yet. One of the sets at the edge rotates in the other direction, and on the reverse side of them sits Bishop Edward Vergerus. Everyone who has seen Bergman’s film immediately finds themselves in a state of mental turmoil when they know that everything will change after a joyful Christmas night. Evil is already present for us viewers, but not for the Ekdahls. However, the viewer should not lock the following of the events into their memories of the film, as Westerberg has also included content from the book, which was later adapted from the film.

The events begin in 1907. Although Ingmar Bergman was not born until 1918, the events are based on his own childhood memories. In Westerberg’s play, however, time is not really tied to anything, but clothes and children’s Christmas presents, for example, move the passage of time closer to the present day. This also works perfectly successfully, because it is not a question of time or place, but of the mind. And the story of the play is not meant to be realistic, as it is filtered and coloured by Alexander.

Not everything is even in the world of Alexander’s memories and thoughts. Bergman himself said of the structure of his film that some things are seen from Alexander’s point of view, others more objectively. “I’ve changed my perspective as it suited me.” In any case, the essential thing is that the events had some level of counterparts in Bergman’s own childhood experiences, at different stages a sweet home life, singing and playing, and theatre, and on the other hand, the harshness and outright brutality of a closed circle of life, the denial of everything nice and false moralism.

Alexander and Fanny, Olavi Uusivirta and Elena Leeve,  experience all this in such a beautiful and after intermission in such a miserable way that the viewing experience is first enchanting, then hateful. Fanny and Alexander’s interplay on stage is unparalleled. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Olavi and Elena have known each other since secondary school and also from Kallio Upper Secondary School. They were also at the Theatre Academy at the same time, although in different years. Fanny and Alexander’s life in Piispala is pure hell, and it may be that something like this sometimes exists even today in reconstituted families, and then the children have no other option than to immerse themselves in the world offered, for example, by the magic lantern of the magic lantern.

All the other actors also give such robust performances that the images from the stage are still vivid in my mind as I write this. At one point yesterday, however, a film in which the bishop is played by Jan Malmsjö inevitably came up for comparison. The role work is so horribly brutal and Malmsjö is so repulsive with his mere appearance that now in the theatre Eero Aho does not achieve the same evilness. And the performance at the Helsinki City Theatre is not quite as dark a nightmare as the film anyway.