Review: Män kan inte våldtas

★★★★★

The performance of A Man Can’t Be Raped is an excellent choice from Lilla Teatern right now, and Minttu Mustakallio is perfect for the lead role

The revenge story of the performance turns into a multifaceted one to open up gender roles and power patterns.

Märta Tikkanen’s Man Can’t Be Raped, published in 1975, is not only a feminist classic that retains its (shock) value, but also a precision novel to the grey areas of the #metoo era of 2020. An excellent choice for Lilla Teatern right now!

The recently divorced Tove Randers (Minttu Mustakallio) turns 40, goes to celebrate it at a restaurant and ends up at the home of her dance partner Martin W (Robert Kock) in the wee hours. Martin claims that the woman likes rough grips even though she doesn’t admit it, and with this excuse he rapes Tove. Tove, on the other hand, takes revenge by raping the man.

The story of revenge turns into a multifaceted one to open up gender roles and power patterns in the dramatization of Sara Giese and Lo Kauppi and under the precise direction of Giese.

Everything is played out on the front ramp and there is already a back wall near the edge. On the wall, Tove draws her rape plan and the whole case. Alongside that, Tove’s backgrounds open up, such as the reason for her divorce and her relationships with men, in which Tove has become a pawn in men’s battles and has been left behind by the man she idolizes. His sons grow up to be men. She feels that no relationship is equal.

After a while of the show, I notice that it has smuggled me into many different grey moments related to owning and letting go of the other and sexual shame, and especially to the laws that judge these things – with clinical precision. The performance extracts from the novel an extreme sharpness cloaked in the ordinary.

The ensemble of actors has a common rhythm and perfect timing, as if laughing and casually chopping up the events, recounting them as a choir. Roles are mixed, the voice is the community, us, not an individual case.

The image of the time relies on a few prop landmarks and epochal costumes. The ideas about marriage and the status of women in the 70s are so very different from today, but the question of whether we can live as equal, full people side by side in relationships, sexual intercourse and otherwise has not lost its meaning. In fact, with the #metoo debate, it has become even more acute.

You can’t rape a man, because of the way it is executed, it works specifically as an opener of patriarchy. Brecht still has useful tools.

It’s really hard to imagine anyone who is as well suited to the role as Minttu Mustakallio. The mundane and the dignified are present in him at the same time, and the almost convulsive need not to be a victim is overcome by the ability to take a cool, almost ironic distance from things.

I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed such a detailed, clumsy and emotionally distancing stage violence as the rape scene staged by Mustakallio. The spectators are in the role of a witness, not a terrifier. The backlash performance is shocking.

After the performance , I feel like shouting: Thank you, Minttu Mustakallio, on behalf of all women! But A Man Can’t Be Raped is not really a man-woman work, especially not in modern times. It is a more universal narrative of human rigidity, condemnation, and shame in a world where truth cannot survive without violence, and where equality is a lie that secures stronger power and honor.

Rebellion is needed, still.