Review: Män kan inte våldtas

Director Sara Giese has created an appealingly light, musical and stylish staging of Men Can’t Be Raped.

Märta Tikkanen’s groundbreaking novel Men Cannot Be Raped has not been removed from its seventies environment when it is now staged as a theatre at Lilla Teatern, and rightly so. Part of the benefit of reading the novel from 1975 is precisely the image of the time, and on the stage of Lilla Teatern, both “farmers” and jazz ballet are offered. And, yes, a wet vorschmack dinner with a partner swap for dessert.

Today, the main character, the municipal employee Tova Randers, a mother of two, would have had access to subjective day care and perhaps entered working life a little earlier. On the other hand, it is distressing that the thoughts that swirl after she was raped on her fortieth birthday sound so familiar to this day. No one will believe her, they will point out that she was drunk, that she both danced and went home with the rapist, yes, even drank his liqueur. Today’s legislation may be better, but the victim is still blamed, his crime is still turned into her shame.

Director Sara Giese has created an appealingly light, musical and stylish staging. It’s a pleasure to see the actors, in their period blue denim clothes, move elegantly against the simple yellow pine of the feature wall. Impressive is the way set designer Sven Haraldsson manages to create so much atmosphere with small means, such as a piimä box or a pea-green landline phone. And in a strange way, the performance manages to convey that Men Can’t Be Raped is a real Helsinki novel, despite the fact that it is played against the same unchanging backdrop wall.

The Free Seventies

Of course, not everything is easy and lively. On the contrary, in short, effective moments, the tone is distorted into the grotesque, the light becomes intrusive, the music gets stuck and a nauseating atmosphere takes over.

Gender roles are the theme of the story. The freedom that the sweet seventies and Tova’s ex-husband Jon Randers preach, is a male sexual freedom. Sara Giese takes a carnivalesque approach to these issues, and Pia Runnakko , for example, makes a wonderfully cheeky and rather destructive interpretation of the filthy Jon Randers. Incidentally, Runnakko is also spot on as the librarian Agneta, who rhythmically sorts library books between brisk lines.

Large parts of Tova Randers’ revenge plan, to rape the perpetrator herself, are portrayed with features of black comedy. A way for art to treat the trauma, to disarm the rapist, to talk about, see and touch what society prefers to keep silent.

Fine performance

Minttu Mustakallio is a very strong actress who can convey total resignation, anger and comedy in the role of Tova just by frowning.

Robert Kock does not make a stereotype but a whole person out of the rapist Martti Wester, both genuinely unpleasant and pathetic.

Joachim Wigelius humorously conveys the essence of the self-righteous lover B, who sees it as a matter of course that a harmonious home life also includes a mistress. But also Alexander Wendelin as the teenage son Jockum shows both a sense of the role and of the rhythmic narrative of the performance.

Ulriikka Heikinheimo plays his girlfriend Bimbi, but more important is her contribution as a choreographer. Her playful and unfussy choreography goes hand in hand with Robert Kock’s snappy musical setting, which in an ingenious way expresses the play’s different emotional states.