Review: Äktenskapsgrejen
Three strong women meet at the cottage – Lilla Teatern’s stage is full of emotions
With Lilla Teatern’s play Äktenskapsgreje, it is possible to travel back to the summer and to the cottage. The play takes place in August.
Irma (Laila Björkstam) is at the cottage with her long-term boyfriend Fred (Joachim Wigelius). Silja (Jonna Järnefelt), Irma’s daughter, and Ca (Oksana Lommi), Fred’s daughter, also arrive.
Silja is going through a divorce crisis. She suffers from a sense of uselessness when, in addition to her husband, the children have flown away from home and the family’s shared home has also been rented out.
Silja hopes to get comfort from her mother, but her mother doesn’t give her that. The mother herself has other things to think about. She is planning a wedding with Fred and moving to Spain.
Silja’s ex-husband (Carl-Kristian Rundman) also comes to the cottage with the papers to be signed from time to time to mix up his own spoon.
Emotions are running high
Disappointment causes crying and screaming, alcohol consumption and boxing tantrums. Even lobster is used as a hitting tool.
All three women behave in a very similar way at first. If there is no desired reaction, support or understanding to their problem or bad feeling, they get angry blindly.
In other words, women demand the desired response from the other, such as love, but do not know how to give others what they expect from others.
A good example is the adoption that had taken place when Silja was a small baby. Irma had been forced to give Silja up for adoption when she was a single parent.
Silja only finds out about it now at the cottage when she has found her adoption papers. Silja had been adopted for a short time before Irma had brought her back to her.
Silja has a tantrum when she hears about it, to which her mother Irma responds quite cynically.
A daughter begging for love
In this play, the actors really get to do their best: strong emotions are presented with crying, rage and screaming quite uninhibitedly.
I’ve never seen Jonna Järnefelt rolling and crawling on stage crying and screaming before. The role is demanding, but Jonna does it brilliantly as a daughter begging for love. Harrowing is the scene where Silja wants to hug her mother, but she runs away from her daughter around the summer cottage.
Laila Björkstam as Irma’s mother plays a self-centered, elderly woman who does not want to see the truth about her future husband and apparently has not been able to take responsibility for her own child either.
Oksana Lommi, who plays the young student Cata, aptly portrays the pain of separating from her father in kickboxing on stage.