Review: Vain parasta minulle
Maija Vilkkumaa’s good-humoured Sea Weather was about to steal the whole show – Helsinki City Theatre’s “Ein europäisches Abendmahl” was a celebration of acting
Helsinki City Theatre’s Only the Best for Me is a collection of miniature plays by three different playwrights. The theatre markets the performance under the names of the scriptwriters, and why wouldn’t it. Sofi Oksanen’s I Love You Already, Elina Snicker’s Cry for a Stranger and Maija Vilkkumaa’s Sea Weather already looked like a sturdy cocktail in advance.
When seen, Only the Best for Me was a celebration of great acting. At least I was impressed by how wide-ranging and skillful an actor, for example, Vappu Nalbantoglu is. She transformed from the role of a neurotic woman suffering from infertility in Oksanen’s I Love You Now into a cheerful, sparkling social media character in Maiju Vilkkumaa’s Merisää, a modern Renaissance person, as if by magic.
The same can be said of the acting of Aurora Manninen, Riitta Havukainen, Kaisa Torkkeli and Merja Larivaara. Wonderful! Great!
The miniature plays also jumped smoothly from one genre to another. It told about the skills of Aino Kivi, who directed the plays, as a director. From the strongly distancing Central European expressionism, there was a tragicomedy depicting the fear of old age to burlesque rejoicing.
The themes of the plays were similar to their authors. That is probably why at least some of the subtle nuances of the plays failed to be understood by the writer.
The biological clock is ticking, and the gap between reality and the artificial reality created by market forces is not only oppressive, it also exploits and kills. The conflict between reality and dreams is already indicated by the satirical title given to the three plays as a whole.
On the deck of the sinking Titanic, you are also allowed to be silly. It won’t help stop the eco-catastrophe that is progressing at an accelerating pace, but it doesn’t really do any harm either. You have to live as long as you have life.
In the script, director Kivi tells how three very different texts have begun to talk to each other during the production process. Of the miniature plays, Oksanen’s I Love You Already Now was performed first, then Snicker’s Cry for a Stranger and lastly, after the intermission, Vilkkumaa’s Merisää.
The order must have been well thought out. Vilkkumaa’s Sea Weather might have stolen the whole show for good if it had been performed first. Last of the three, it left a good aftertaste to taste. The sea weather was a tasty brain candy.
Vilkkumaa has the ability to write witty dialogue and see the oddities of today’s world in a funny light.
It is impossible for an outsider to know how the aesthetics of Merisää came about through the collaboration of the screenwriter, director, Mika Haaranen, who designed the sets and projection, costume designer Laura Dammert, choreographer Kaisa Torkkel, lighting designer William Iles, and the actors who designed the masks.
In any case, the end result was captivatingly funny. Vilkkumaa has made the most of the strangeness of the digital age in the near-future Helsinki, which is drowning in a flood.
Nalbantoglu as the play’s Henna Syrjälä, the rowing mermaid, was no one to retreat. She let her candle burn brightly as an Instagram princess emphasizing the curves of her butt with padding. He didn’t even mind that the Christmas holidays were coming and his lover was going to his wife’s house.
Larivaara was equally captivating as Matilda Tahkolaakso, the financial manager of the duo’s joint company, who suffered from a serious gambling addiction but did not let it interfere with her bright outlook on life.
The third wheel in the play was Torkkel as the civil servant cyborg Anjana, who designed the stunning choreography. The trio’s collaboration on stage was seamless and wonderful to watch. The apocalyptic atmosphere was brought into the play with the help of as many as nine voice roles.
In Snicker’s Cry for a Stranger, Havukainen shone in the swimming pool as a troublesome old man. Manninen was a lieutenant at the beginning of his military career, exuding physical health and strength, who had come to the swimming pool to hold a Cooper test for conscripts.
The contrast was strong. Snicker has placed surprising twists and turns in his story that emphasized that life does not always follow the planned paths.
Oksanen’s I Love You Already Now was included in the Austrian National Theatre’s European Communion (Ein europäisches Abendmahl), a play of five miniature plays. The other four screenwriters were Szenen von Jenny Erpenbeck, Nino Haratischwili, Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek and Terézia Mora.
The collection of plays premiered at the Burg Theatre in Vienna in January 2017. In other words, Helsinki City Theatre’s Only Best for Me repeats the same idea.
As a playwright, Oksanen has adopted a style that represents the mainstream theatre in Central Europe. The strongly distanced play consisted of two long monologues, which were complemented by Helena Haaranen’s voice role from the video.
Manninen played Daria, a young single parent from Ukraine who tries to get out of the debt trap by becoming a gamete donor. Nalbantoglu played a Finnish Marja who suffers from infertility and the severe obsessive-compulsive symptoms it causes.
Both were victims. The tragic nature of Daria’s story was emphasized by the fact that in Ukraine, the loss of credit rating is not the worst thing that happens to a person caught in a payday loan spiral. Poverty, corrupt government, organised crime and a lack of prospects drive young women in the country to desperate solutions and to become victims of exploitation.
The characters in the play had been distanced to such an extent that it was difficult to feel any sympathy for them. The atmosphere was so cold that it almost made my teeth chatter.
However, the core of the story became visible through the really skillful use of videos. The cruel laws of market forces were made clear, as was the contradiction between the fake reality and reality of advertisements.