Review: Äktenskapsgrejen

★★★★

You can’t say that you’re surprised when you come across a new Finnish-Swedish drama in which a group of people gather at a villa on a beautiful summer day to sort out their relationships.

Gunilla Hemming’s Äktenskapsgrejen (The Marriage Story) settles into its usual setting so naturally that the formality turns to the play’s advantage and begins to emphasize the special characteristics of the chosen themes.

The relationship between generations and genders is dealt with in such a crisp and fresh way in the work, which is classified as a drama-comedy, that in the end, the traditional glass veranda with its lace curtains and wicker chairs could have been erected on the stage of Lilla Teatern to replace the now chosen allusive set.

Äktenskapsgrejen is above all a play with three major female roles.

The most effective and effective tension in the performance, directed by Cris af Enehielm, is formed between eighty-year-old Irma (Laila Björkstam) and her daughter Silja (Jonna Järnefelt).

In the midst of the crisis, Silja arrives to seek comfort from her mother, who in turn has never felt any calling to motherhood.

Devoted to her family, Silja’s grown-up children have gone out into the world and her husband has moved in with his young female friend.

Irma, who has held on to her independence and freedom, has in turn decided to get married, move to Spain with her much younger boyfriend and sell Silja’s childhood home.

The setting, which is credible in its exaggerations and balanced in its treatment, is complemented by Irma’s boyfriend’s young daughter Ca (Oksana Lommi), who challenges women to reassess things with her own attitude, and who, as a child of divorce, also has her own problems to sort out with her distant father (Joachim Wigelius).

For various reasons, Silja’s unfaithful husband (Carl-Kristian Rundman) also repeatedly appears at the villa, who is by no means surprising as a character, but whose encounters with Silja offer delicious situations in their overwhelming tragicomicity.

Björkstam, Järnefelt and Lommi do a uniquely tough job as mothers and daughters of three different generations.

The number of fears, hopes, expectations and disappointments is probably the same for all people, but everyone makes their own decisions to be able to live with them.

Encountering and accepting the decisions made by other people offers an additional challenge to life, especially when it comes to people close to you who have contributed to your own decisions.