Review: Rakastunut Shakespeare

Quality time and culture with a teenager – impossible?

What do you expect when you take your teenager to the theater? Screaming and grumbling, unruly and sloppy slouching after you, squirming on the bench and sighing? What do you expect when you take a teenager to the theatre to see a play about Shakespeare? All of the above to the power of two?

That’s what you’d think. But Helsinki City Theatre’s Shakespeare in Love made teenagers both laugh out loud and praise several times that it was really good!

That was the biggest surprise of the play. Otherwise, the performance follows the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love. In the story, Will Shakespeare (Heikki Ranta) is a poet struggling with a lack of money, whose poetic vein has completely dried up. Fate throws a muse, Lady Viola, in his way. But since fate in the Shakespearean manner is notoriously capricious, this lovely maiden has been promised to marry another. Tragic love revives the poet’s creativity and makes him the Shakespeare we know him as.

But contrary to what the title and this simplified plot description might suggest, the City Theatre’s play is the show of the object of love, not Shakespeare. Miila Virtanen, who plays Lady Viola, is both charming and energetic, and more than about the poet’s creative pain, the story is about whether a woman is allowed to make her dreams come true or not.

In Shakespeare’s time, women were not allowed to perform on stage, and a respectable woman did not even go to see plays. But Lady Viola’s greatest love is theater and poetry, and she dreams of becoming an actress. To make his dream come true, he dresses up as a man and gets the role of Romeo in Shakespeare’s new play Romeo and Juliet. This leads to both mishaps and love, and both women in pants and men in dresses – easy humour, but it makes you laugh. Alongside the humour, Lady Viola’s struggle against her fate and, of course, the kind of love that changes the direction of her life.

The teenagers seemed to be particularly amused by the classic bush humor, and the mother especially enjoyed the gorgeous costumes and sets. In addition to Miila Virtanen’s performance, the best role of the actors is played by Heidi Herala’s exuberant breastfeeding character. The stage of the recently renovated Helsinki City Theatre has really been utilised. The sets are perhaps the best ever seen on a theatre stage in Finland: the audience is transported from the court to the pub and from the theatre to the bedroom with versatile structures.