Review: Paradisdoktrinen
Atheist cyborgs
The earth has ended. The earth is burning. The only ones left are some atheistic cyborgs, Eve and Adam, who live on genetically modified fish and hunger for doomsday. (Karoliina Koiso-Kanttila has created stylish robot costumes out of wires, plotters and pinals) Iida Kuningas and Martin Bahne , who play Eva and Adam, have a fantastic interplay – they are brilliant together on stage.
At the same time, God (Lidia Bäck) sits, broken down by low self-confidence and a feeling of being superfluous and unloved, and misses the Middle Ages, when humanity still sought solace in him. Bäck makes a strong and incomparably good performance. But to God’s great joy, the cyborgs Eva and Adam finally ask for help, albeit by mistake. God thus decides to update His favorite creation, man, and at the same time be born as their son David.
The new Eva and the new Adam match on Tinder, they move in together, they have their son and Adam gets help with his penis problems from Knausgård. All is well and joy until the nuclear family learns that an asteroid will collide with Earth in sixteen years. How this trinity now chooses to live its last years is the problem the ensemble wants to address.
Teater Mestola in collaboration with the Swedish independent group 4:e Teatern will make a guest appearance at Viirus in May with the newly written play Paradise Doctrine by Fabian Silén. Silén has previously written The Comedy about Felix’s life – and the transience of everything, which was posted on Nicken NU in the spring of 2015. There are clear similarities: the twisted existential humour and the disintegration of the nuclear family, but this time Silén goes a little deeper under the skin. The Swedish performing arts duo Fredrik Lundqvist and Joséphine Wistedt are directing.
The Paradise Doctrine is like a hybrid between Perplex by the German playwright Marius von Mayenburg , which was played at Viirus a couple of years ago, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia. Bizarre dystopian comedy that flirts with 1980s pop art.
The tempo is high in the first act and the audience laughs loudly and often. The second act is a little more uneven and some jokes could be deleted. One scene stands out, when Eva is sitting in the waiting room at a doctor’s office and we hear her inner monologue. The script is poetic, but the language is very different from Eva’s character and from the rest we’ve seen so far, so the scene becomes quite unbelievable. I also can’t, despite a sleepless night, still understand the ending. The purpose of God’s plan remained somewhat ambiguous. But any lows are overshadowed by the fact that The Paradise Doctrine is an exceptionally entertaining play.
A dialogue between Milton Friedman, sometimes called the father of neoliberalism, and David alludes to Michelangelo’s fresco The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, but this time it is capitalism that is the new god. The constant need to improve ourselves, correct the body, have interesting projects we can impress our friends with is seen in the characters’ choices. Adam realizes himself as a DJ and David as a bodybuilder. Eva is the only one who thinks about her own meager existence, but she becomes so paralyzed by the thought of the end of the world that the only thing she can do is create a lifestyle vlog.
The Paradise Doctrine examines man’s incredible ability not to be able to see beyond his nose, to be able to shut out everything that happens outside of himself. The play doesn’t give answers to what we should focus on instead of our vlogs and bodies, it’s not God anyway, but it wakes us up for a moment from our navel-gazing.