Review: Fingerpori
Fingerpori challenges actors and costume design – Seven actors perform more than 70 roles in two hours
Comic artist Pertti Jarla’s Fingerpori is now wiping hard. This spring, the comic turned 12 years old, and during the same year, the story of the comic book characters will be seen both as a play and as a film.
The Helsinki City Theatre is currently performing a play based on the world created by Jarla. Naturally, all the central characters of the comic are included, from Heimo Vesa to Rivo-Riitta. All in all, more than 70 different characters will be seen on stage during the two hours.
There must be plenty of hustle and bustle behind the stage as the actors quickly change their clothes. In one moment there is Jesus on stage and a moment later the same actor is already Tom of Finland.
The son of God and the homosexual are in perfect harmony in the colourful world of Fingerpori, which is literally bursting with various references to politics and popular culture. You could very well go to see the play with your eyes on how many points of contact you can find with other comics, television series and music pieces in the play.
One of the hilarious scenes is the return of the Black Mask. The character is quite old since the last time I saw him: reading glasses hanging around his neck and artificial joints in his knees.
Actor Pekka Huotari pulls off the role excellently and the audience bursts into laughter at the latest when he sings Elastinen’s Superpowers.
Fingerpori doesn’t pock
In the play Fingerpori, the humour is largely built on various wordplay and misunderstandings, just like Jarla’s comic. There are horizontal mambo, gingerbread and sticks.
The play is a little naughty, but not rancid. Nothing is more fun than Satan’s family heirlooms getting stuck between the floor hatch in a handsome entrance.
The same performance smoothly accommodates Satan and Jesus, Hitler and Putin. Fingerpori doesn’t poke fun at anyone, but it provokes by questioning all norms of decency.
There is also topical humour from current politics. There is the candidate of Paavo Väyrynen’s party, Börje Börgelsson, the controversy of Esperi Care and the rise of the Social Democratic Party.
The town of Fingerpori is a kind of combination of a small Finnish village and a fictional place. The craziest features of society filter through there.
It would be exciting to see how the play reacts to the upcoming parliamentary elections. The jokes will probably have to be fine-tuned a bit during the spring when the election results are known.
Characters like in a small village
In the play, Heimo Vesa, played by Jari Pehkonen, is on stage almost all the time. He is a plump and bald man, just like his role model.
Pehkonen is the only actor who can survive with one role in this play. The other actors have more than a dozen different characters to play.
The six actors are responsible for making Fingerpori look like a living village, and they certainly succeed in that. For example, in Tinder’s copy Blinder, there is such a cavalcade of grooms that you don’t want to keep up.
The frequently changing characters have also caused headaches for the costume department. Outfits change frequently and there are dozens of them.
You can’t help but admire the ensembles of costumes, wigs and make-ups. They allow the same person to easily transform into a completely different character for the next scene.
All in all, Fingerpori is an entity of intertextual references that is impossible to condense into even 3,000 characters. It spreads to all areas of life, but the common thread still holds together thanks to Pehkonen. And above all, it makes for many sweet laughs.