Review: Herra Puntila ja hänen renkinsä Matti
Brecht’s conception of theatre blossoms at the Helsinki City Theatre in all the colours of the rainbow – Lappeenranta’s own son Pertti Sveholm was liberated and wonderfully crazy in the role of Puntila
This autumn, the Helsinki City Theatre has been caught up in some kind of virtuous circle. Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti is a hilarious performance. At Thursday’s premiere, all anchors were loose.
“If the working group on stage manages to get into a state of uninhibited creativity, raw material is created that sounds and hits everything that only lives in the viewer’s head.”
This is how Kari Heiskanen, who directed Puntila for the City Theatre, describes in the script the method used to work on the production during rehearsals.
When all this creative fumbling goes smoothly, so to speak, brilliant theatre is created. Bertolt Brecht’s concept of theatre was bathed in bright light and all the colours of the rainbow at the premiere.
And all this did not only happen on the small stage that is located between the viewer’s ears. As a director, Heiskanen is a true virtuoso in managing the stage space.
In the first scene, we were shown in a very concrete way how huge the big stage of the Helsinki City Theatre is. The next scene started a continuous movement that sucked me in as a viewer without help.
The stage images created by Heiskanen, set designer Markku Hakuri, lighting designer Mika Ijäs and choreographer Johanna Elomaa were phenomenally fine work. Or maybe the carousel better describes the dynamic movement language that pushed the performance forward at speed.
Pertti Sveholm, who lived and grew up in Lappeenranta as a child and young person, was absolutely amazing as the host of Puntila. Sveholm has played many great roles during his career. It is wrong to say that he is now in the role of his life. However, I don’t remember ever seeing such a liberated, wonderfully crazy and funny Sveholm on stage before.
The same applies to Anna-Riikka Rajanen, who plays Puntila’s daughter Eeva, Antti Peltola, who plays Matti Aaltonen, and all the other actors in the production. In the Puntila auditorium, I got the same strong feeling as in the auditorium of the musical Kinky Boots – this performance has a lift. The successes feed off each other, which I think also speaks well of the Helsinki City Theatre as a work community.
Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti is theatre with a capital T precisely because its characters do not need to be approached through identification, but through interaction. This characteristic is what makes theatre such a unique art.
Tiina Kaukanen’s costumes, Maija Sillanpää’s camouflage and make-up and Eradj Nazimo’s sound design also deserve their own praise. Good theatre is full of surprises. Mr. Puntila and His Servant Matti is a theatre in which Brecht’s concept of theatre, distancing the audience, works exactly as it should be very tonal and colourful.
In the programme, Mr. Puntila and His Servant Matti is a play by Bertolt Brecht and Hella Wuolijoki. The text is based on Wuolijoki’s play The Sawdust Princess. Brecht was a refugee in Finland during the Interim Peace, and Wuolijoki used to entertain his German guests by reading excerpts from his play to them in German.
Together, Brecht and Wuolijoki edited a new version of the play, which was submitted to a Finnish playwright competition under the name Iso-Heikkilä’s master and his servant Kalle.
According to the script, The Sawdust Princess was a country comedy rejected by theatres. There must have been a reason for the rejection.
On Friday, Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti first looked suspiciously like a Finnish country comedy. There is traditional Finnish drunkenness, customs originating from the society of the gentry, and an immodest couple of young lovers trying to overcome the obstacles created by the patriarchal class society.
The basic setting is the same, which has been played countless times in summer theatres and is still played in country comedies on television, for example.
Mr. Puntila has a role model, a relative of Wuolijoki. Matti’s role model has been considered to be Wuolijoki’s own driver. The people of Häme and the Häme countryside with its bright summer nights were also familiar to Wuolijoki.
Still, The Sawdust Princess and at least the Helsinki City Theatre’s Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti are undoubtedly a fresh and subtle parody of this genre of theatre loved by Finns.
At its core, however, the story is tragic, as is customary in a good comedy. This story is also known to all those who have alcoholics in their circle of friends or relatives. When all the bridges have been burned and the connection to one’s own self has also dissolved during the booze-soaked years, all that remains is inconsolable loneliness and premature death.
Of course, Heiskanen and his working group also achieve the social dimension characteristic of Wuolijoki’s and Brecht’s plays. Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti is a very simple and apt description of power.
For example, the scene in which Puntila and his servant were recruiting new employees from the Finnish laundry market in the 1930s made me laugh. How little things have changed in the world. I was forced to think of the ways in which people are humiliated with the meticulous rules of the authorities and outright arbitrariness in the TE Offices.
And this image was certainly not created by chance, but by the intention of the creators.
We, the audience of Puntila’s premiere, were specifically in the theatre and at least I enjoyed being in the theatre uninhibitedly. The quality of the performance was already indicated by the fact that the play, which lasted almost three hours, felt significantly shorter than its actual duration.