Review: Suomen hauskin mies
DEEP LAUGHTER IN THE WAITING ROOM OF DEATH
A play about a Red prison camp knows how to combine laughter and horror.
Reckless, foolhardy. I thought about something like that when I first heard the idea for the play The Funniest Man in Finland: a comedy from the Red prison camp in Suomenlinna in 1918. I wonder if there is a reason to go to the waiting room of death?
In any case, the play, written by Heikki Kujanpää and Mikko Reitala and directed by Kujanpää, premiered two weeks ago at the Helsinki City Theatre. My prejudices were unnecessary: from the very first minutes, a hellishly funny death rally spreads out in front of me. It is the cross-currents of the greatest fear and the smallest hopes, in which people sway.
Let us immediately take into account the space, the set design, the striking and strongly coloured stage images. The small stage is perfectly suited to the needs of the performance, the platforms that move up and down, the rotating floor and the diverse structures allow for all kinds of surprises. Every nook and cranny is utilized.
Pekka Korpiniity’s set design is inventive, at times even shocking. And the same goes for Sari Salmela’scostumes and Tuula Kuittinen’s camouflages.
The intimate theatre space increases the effect – the performance inevitably creeps close to the viewer, yet not intrusively.
Timo Hietala’s music is funky. It is not just any background sound, but elements that carry the narrative and even independently. The melodies also deliberately have a glimpse of recognizable passages. A wind-oriented orchestra is excellent.
Suosalo wins Theatre Act of the Year
The basic idea of the play is a clear take-it-or-leave-it situation: prepare, those sentenced to death, a clever amusement play for the camp’s dignitaries, and you will not only live longer, but you will also be able to get a fair trial. Before and after the offer, a bunch of plot twists emerge that justify and deepen the roles. The cast works as a group and as individuals.
The dynamo of the play is Martti Suosalo, whose actor-red chief Toivo Parikka combines elements of real people of the era. Suosalo slips completely into Parikka, who orchestrates his ragged crew, negotiates, sumps, charms and infuriates.
It is a pleasure to see the intensity with which Suosalo throws his acting talent into the game. Parikka is an all-powerful revelation, and in the end, no one will find out about the guy. Theatre Act of the Year!
There is something in Suosalo’s replication that many plays miss: the balance of precise beats and pauses. As a monologue, Parikka describes his meeting with Jesus in his moonshine and confesses that he shot the vicar of Kallio.
Parikka’s opponents are Jaeger Lieutenant Alfred Nyborg (Heikki Ranta), camp commandant Hjalmar Kalm (Rauno Ahonen) and his wife Helen (Vappu Nalbantoglu), and the prisoners are the evening actor Johansson (Jari Pehkonen). How the mutual relations are finally reversed is reflected in the power of the script and direction.
Nalbantoglu embodies the contradictions between Helen’s bleak shell and the storm within. Ahonen’s Kalm is as icy as Ranta’s jaeger is becoming more humane. The casting as a whole is precise, without a single unnecessary character.
In these circumstances, humanism is weighed
Extreme topics are explored on stage. In what ways does each respond to the presence of death? Someone presses their gaze and another looks into the eyes, one goes crazy and the other hits the nail on the head. Humanism is weighed in conditions where the superior can decide on the life of the lower one by roughly trembling his eyebrows.
Kujanpää and Reitala conjure up the story to be airy and heavy. Too often we do not see such a thing, where the heaviest sorrow so effortlessly alternates with the deepest joy and the most raucous laughter. It is also a merit that, mainly from the prisoners’ point of view, the performance does not make a complete fool of the opposing party. Of the whites, Helen Kalm and Alfred Nyborg are the liveliest.
Finland’s funniest man is sufficiently anchored in the real world of 1918. Imaginative elements are intertwined, in large quantities – as is the case in the best theatre art.
The rest remains open. When P. E. Svinhufvud (Risto Kaskilahti) lays flowers on the Finnish flag, whose memory does he honour: the memory of the white dead, the white and red victims, the memory of a united and united nation? Memory of Finland?