Review: Rakastunut Shakespeare

Review of Shakespeare in Love by the City of Helsinki: Rowdy supporting characters bring roughness to the cute comedy

The large stage of the Helsinki City Theatre has sometimes been critically referred to as an airport. Even in larger productions, directors sometimes have trouble filling the wide space with events and dialogue, which may resonate especially in a space that is challenging in terms of width.

In the romantic comedy “Shakespeare in Love”, directed by Kari Arffman, those problems are not visible. Rather, at times it feels like Katariina Kirjavainen’s sets and an ensemble of 26 people plus one dog are difficult to fit on this runway.

The production is really big for a basic comedy, usually only in musicals of this scale. The City Theatre’s dance group has also been harnessed to the performance in its entirety, but now it is not to colour the musical numbers, but to bring movement and energy to the crowd scenes, and most of the dancers also play speaking roles.

No women on stage!

The City Theatre’s production follows the course of the film that cleaned the Oscar table in 1998 quite closely, down to the appearance of many of the characters. Miila Virtanen and Heikki Ranta, who play the lead roles, are a very cute Finnish counterpart to the film’s Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes.

Movie comparisons aside, because Shakespeare in Love works well as an independent theatrical performance without seeing the film – it might be more rewarding without the ballast that is transferred from the screen. The City Theatre’s performance is carefully crafted stage entertainment, robust in form and light in content. The story might have been unbearably dreamy if its supporting characters hadn’t been turned into show thieves happily typed in Tokoinranta. These thieves – whose names include Klemettilä, Ahonen, Herala, Mattila, Haaranen, Pehkonen – each in turn shatters the atmosphere in which the main couple, the writer Will Shakespeare, who is on the verge of a breakthrough, and the noblewoman Viola de Lesseps, who is interested in theatre, float.

The trick is that since women had no business on stage in Shakespeare’s era, Viola has to pretend to be a man, Thomas Kent, in order to be included in Shakespeare’s new play. Will appreciates the “youngster’s” acting skills, but also feels a strange attraction to him. The secret of the suction power is revealed to the writer when a completely other-sensory actor is revealed behind Kent’s moustache.

Many obstacles have been piled up in the way of the fulfillment of these two loves, the first being Viola’s father, Lord de Lesseps, who has gone to promise his daughter to a wealthy nobleman, and this possessive scoundrel himself, Lord Wessex. Minor plagues in a writer’s life are incomprehensible and restless theatre directors, superior rival colleagues, and poverty.

Romeo and Juliet as a laughing bomb

Kari Arffman’s direction takes a lot of pleasure out of the early 1600s English court bookkeeping and, in particular, the realisation of Shakespeare’s breakthrough work “Romeo and Juliet”, which he is working on, with quite amateurish forces. The play also suggests that the story of the love between two teenagers in Verona, which was intended to be a comedy but turned into a tragedy, did not mature in Will’s head without the help of friends.

It is in the Romeo and Juliet plot that Jouko Klemettilä’s acting-enthusiastic tavern owner, Kari Mattila’s Kari Mattila plays the commandant of a rival theatre company, the greedy theatre owner Henslow (Jari Pehkonen) and the usurer Fennyman (Rauno Ahonen), who sounds strongly like Jussi Jurkka, who forgets his brutal inheritance actions for a moment when he gets to act. When the stage of London’s Rose Theatre starts working on a tragedy with a not-so-frivolous snack, a carefree over-the-top comedy is born on the stage of the City Theatre in the spirit of slapstick. Theatre within a theatre drama works like this at its best.

Other cute supporting characters are the haughty but ironic Queen Elisabeth I, played by Helena Haaranen, her slick Marshal of the Court (Risto Kaskilahti) and Viola’s housewife, played by Heidi Herala, who gets to play the role of a crazy suckler, which is always part of Shakespeare’s gallery of roles.

Without that excellent, slightly filthy “gallery of fools”, Shakespeare in Love would be indifferent soap. Not cheap, but it smells like a mother and slips easily out of the grip. Now the City Theatre’s performance also satisfies the taste of those who like a slightly more oblique comedy. It also includes the fact that the story doesn’t end as sugary as is often the case in these romantic comedies.