Review: Sufflören
The Helsinki City Theatre is in the middle of a veritable monologue autumn. Taneli Mäkelä performs on the Arena stage as Sweden’s Mielensäpahoittaja, Heidi Herala on the small stage as Everstinna and now the latest Joachim Wigelius at Lilla Teatern as a whisperer.
The monologue performed by Wigelius is succinctly called Sufflören, or Whisperer in Finnish. The play begins deliciously when no performers appear on stage. At the premiere, the amazement is palpable as the audience looks around.
Finally, actor Joachim Wigelius rises from the front row from the whisperer’s seat to the stage. He has a story to tell about the theatre’s most invisible employee, who, in the best case, doesn’t say a word during the whole evening.
The story is conveyed on several different levels than in a high-quality personal interview. The Whisperer talks about his childhood, work and theatre in general. The play is written by Swedish actor Andreas T Olsson, who made the play as a rehearsal work at the Theatre Academy.
It explains lines that are bursting with intertextual references to many classic plays, from Shakespeare to Molière and Chekhov. The screenwriter’s goal seems to have been to prove how widely he knows the classics.
The most torturous play of the Whisperer’s career
The Whisperer tells the story of a lonely boy who loved books and poems. He had a pen pal in Denmark who told him about Legoland. He himself wrote analyses of the poems in response.
After a few letters, the Danish guy gave up. The whisperer didn’t care about it, but continued reading and writing.
A lonely boy becomes a lonely man who gets a job at the theatre as a whisperer. He steps into his seat discreetly when the kong has rumbled for the last time, calling the spectators to their seats. She scrolls through the script line by line in each act and is the support and safety of the actors.
Joachim Wigelius, who plays the whisperer, concretely presents the work of the whisperer with the help of his tools. The props of the play are a stand resembling a music stand, where the whisperer keeps his folder.
In addition, he has transported boxes of paper to the pallet. A whisperer will not accept Clas Ohlson’s copy paper, which crackles when you turn the page. That’s why he orders his paper from London, where high-quality sheets are made that don’t make a sound when turned.
Wigelius’s devout browsing through the papers makes the audience laugh. Wigelius has the best laughs when he explains what is the worst play for a whisperer. It is Molière’s Tartuffe and especially the final scene of the play, in which the servant of justice explains his sentence.
The character’s monologue lasts so excruciatingly long that the viewers turn their eyes to the whisperer. How many pages of manuscript are left?
The last minutes are rewarding
Joachim Wigelius performs his role in a tremendously vivid way. He elicits the first laughs by running around the stage headlessly in search of missing actors.
The scenes in which Wigelius jumps into the shoes of other theatre staff members are also hilarious. At best, one man plays four different roles at the same time.
In these situations, the whisperer himself is a bystander. She has been able to watch the artists shine in rehearsals and shine on stage. The tension of the play is created around this setting. The whisperer is so invisible that it is easy to forget that he is needed.
The best parts of the play are seen in the last five minutes. I won’t reveal the ending, but I can promise that the last minutes will reward the patient viewer.