Review: Fanny ja Alexander

I guess that Fanny and Alexander will be talked about on social media, in the city and in the media as a spectacle. That’s not wrong, the scale of the performance’s presentation, the size of the ensemble and its sturdy duration give grounds for this.

However, spectacle is more of a term that describes quantity and mass. Besides, one of the meanings of the word is defined in the dictionary of civilization as “grandiose but superficial film, play”, and that is ill-suited to Paavo Westerberg’s direction, because superficiality is not one of its characteristics.

So I’m looking for an allegory for the performance from the side of music. To me, Fanny and Alexander now appeared and was heard as a symphonic stage work composed to a great extent, in which both requiems and odes to joy were played. It captivated the senses and fed the mind, just like the great works of Mahler or Sibelius themselves. And what is most significant in terms of the overall effect, the 17-member cast that performed this symphony, as well as the staff responsible for visualising the performance and the technical machinery – of course, Sanna Salmenkallio, who also composed the fine score music and was partly responsible for the sound design – made the whole sound sound beautiful. Harmony was born.

IN 1982, Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, and especially its long five-hour TV version, is the one I’ve often thrown on the counter if I’ve been asked the unreasonable “what’s the best film in the world?” question. That is why expectations of the City Theatre’s stage performance were high, but on the other hand, they were mixed with fear. Would Fanny and Alexander be something else on stage than the live illustration of the film, would it be an independent work with its own voice? How could the great and lush story, which evokes overwhelming emotions on the screen every time it is viewed, come to the skin from the airport stage of the City Theatre?

Now you can mark a plus in every point: was, was and came.

Paavo Westerberg has made the stage adaptation based on the prose work that Bergman has adapted from his film script. He has not set out to break up the clash of two family cultures, which grows to epic proportions, but the basic story and all its central characters are present in the play.

The director-dramatist has made such a mess of the work that he has stripped it of the era of the early 1900s, and so a kind of mixed technique is used in the costumes and in the whole scenography: a little old, a little new, something borrowed and probably something blue as well…

Those who are frightened by this kind of “modernization” can be relieved by saying that if at the beginning Fanny and Alexander’s signature sweatshirts and white sneakers or the anachronistic outfit discussion of the Ekdahl family’s Christmas scene still caught the eye, as the performance progresses, such things do not really jump out at the eyes. Of course, one can ask whether this visual solution by Westerberg is meaningful at all. Perhaps it brings its own kind of air to the performance as it frees its characters from patterns from more than a hundred years ago. Besides, the harsh middle act of the play, the difficult time of Fanny, Alexander and their mother Emilie as a stepfamily of Bishop Edvard Vergerus, is drawn in a very disciplined, dreary black-and-grey colour scheme. Even to the point that the children’s everyday costumes are reminiscent of the dark dress code of the Hitler Youth.

THE circular technology of the City Theatre’s main stage is used in Fanny and Alexander so creatively and functionally that I don’t remember seeing anything like it. Ever.

It spreads the whole palette in front of us right from the first stage shot, all the milieus, all the characters. The inner and outer circles rotating at different paces and the set walls spinning on them form a vortex that immediately sucks the viewer into the magic circle of the theatre. Set designer Antti Mattila has not been shy about showing and using the rougher non-façade sides of the walls to create interiors. They are pushed closer to the ramp, often in the background in more intense scenes.

An almost ingenious solution is to use the window openings in the walls as peepholes, so that fragmentary movement can be seen behind the scene in front of them. Like a film strip – yes, for a moment, the performance seems to hint at its film base. This effect is most powerful in the fire scene in the bishop’s house.

The lighting solutions of the performance, with its powerful low-attacking backlighting, rows of spots shining across the entire length of the stage and narrow wedges, are a key part of its visual appeal. If directors and scriptwriters, sometimes also certain actors, have been the primary attraction factor for me, then the lighting designer of the City Theatre, William Iles, will soon start to rise to the same caste. Earlier this autumn, she “dazzled” the musical Priscilla with her joy of light.

In the Bishop’s hots, all movement is more static, while the stage image is expanded almost to the maximum. Bishop Vergerus first interrogates and then physically disciplines Alexander in the acre hall, in the far back corner of which Fanny crouches in the backlight, making shadow shots. Impressive, thrilling. If the Christmas scene for the Ekdahls is the extreme of bright joy in the play, this is the blackest abyss.

THE ONLY THEATRE DRAMA I have seen before by Fanny and Alexander (TTT 2010, directed by Tiina Puumalainen) featured child actors in the title roles. The alternating roles were seen as the offspring of many workers, but since non-professionals could not be expected to master such large speaking roles, Fanny and Alexander were pretty much in a supporting role in their title story. (In terms of dialogue, they were also in Bergman’s film, Alexander as a louder actor, of course, and Fanny as a silent observer.)

Fortunately, things are different in Westerberg’s direction. Fanny (Elena Leeve) and Alexander (Olavi Uusivirta) play the main roles, both on the level of speech and on the level of presence as a whole.

And in what way! Right from his first appearance in the second row of the stands, Leeven, 39 years old,. and the child characters created by Uusivirta, 39 years old, are one hundred percent believed. At no point in a long performance does it make you feel uncomfortable with adults playing children, because the actors do not play their characters through infantility, but internally, perhaps drawing from their own memories. Both characters challenge the adult world with mischief, and on the other hand, escape it with the power of a congruent imagination. In Westerberg’s view, Fanny is also allowed to be an actor. That is why Leeve’s exuberant undisciplines feel so fresh, because they have never been seen before.

Olavi Uusivirta can now be seen at the same time (for a while) in the title role of Hamlet at the National Theatre. The characters are not exactly the same age, but the rebellion against the evil stepfather starts from the same defiance. The way Alexander’s gentle joy turns into gnashing of teeth that alternately stems from rage, skin and soul pain as he moves from Ekdahl’s house to the bishop’s palace is the most arresting thing in the performance.

Eero Aho as Bishop Vergerus plays a role tailored for him. Without exaggeration, without caricaturing the face of evil, he draws a tyrant, a paragon of cruelty, of a man who swears by the name of saints.

Anna-Maija Tuokko as Emilie Ekdahl gives the best performance of her career of all the ones I have seen. Both the joy that arises from Emilie’s artistry and the suffering caused by oppression and the anxiety of her children appear bloody in Tuokko’s work.

Rea Mauranen is as if she was created to portray the multi-coloured character of matriarch Helena Ekdahl, as well as Santeri Kinnunen, was my sure bet on the role of Gustav Ekdahl, a jovial entertainer, when I heard about the City Theatre project in the past.

The casting of the play has been done with piety, so many of the more statistical characters become tasty, such as the bishop’s sister Henrietta Vergerus (Aino Seppo) or the treasurer of the bishop’s house Justina (Leena Rapola).

The SPECTACLE section of the performance is indeed its duration. Productions of more than three and a half hours are quite rare these days, sometime at the turn of the 1980s and 90s they were part of everyday life, the Group Theatre’s Lord of the Rings and the five-hour Karamazov production, as well as the National Theatre’s seven-hour Angels in America to name a few examples.

Mega-long performances are no longer an end in themselves for directors, and that’s a good thing, but they shouldn’t be feared either. The current entertainment culture and media climate have taught us to be too short-sighted, although on the other hand, people on social media seem to brag about their “TV series marathons”, i.e. how they have sucked in an eight-part series from Netflix. So it’s about six hours with a few intervals.

Fanny and Alexander lasts 3.30 with its intermissions, but it doesn’t go empty for a moment, it doesn’t make you yawn at any point. And I don’t really know where to take it off. Bergman’s great saga of the collision of two family cultures and two lifestyles is told to the same extent as it is customary to enjoy on the big screen. At least as lush and thrilling, but even more alive with the magic of theatre. That is why it is the number one choice for those planning a theatre evening this autumn. It gives you everything you can expect from a theatre performance.