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Note: No longer in repertoire!
(Photo: Lehtikuva/Reuters)
Control: Mikko Kivinen
Production: Markus R. Packalén
Costumes: Elina Kolehmainen
Lighting design: Teppo Saarinen
Sound design: Ari-Pekka Saarikko
Cast: Helena Haaranen, Juha Jokela, Jyrki Kovaleff, Hannu Lauri / Markku Huhtamo, Jari Pehkonen, Pihla Penttinen, Eppu Salminen, Helena Vierikko, Tom Wentzel
THE COMEDY OF THE SMARTHEADS American film and theatre comedian Steve Martin’s play is cultural imperialism from across the pond. The play takes place in 1904, when gangsters ruled the United States. The Wild Rabbit Tavern is still a cultural café in Montmartre, Paris. It was home to the rising European geniuses Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein. Alongside them – and ahead of them – Martin highlights his compatriot Elvis. Long live that huge difference! However, the text is excellent: the comedy has a laughable delicacy and at the same time a humanity that reaches beneath the surface. Mikko Kivinen’s solid direction is carried out by Eppu Salminen’s Picasso, who smirks like his role models, and especially Jari Pehkonen’s Einstein, who looks 86 years old all his life. Tom Wentzel plays a strong role as a regular customer who suffers from boyhood in old age. Pihla Penttinen as the waitress rises to the most delightful surprise of the performance. Penttinen’s work combines a close presence and an intellectually conscious approach to the beating, ego-overflowing men of the world. The male viewer already finds himself longing: why on earth didn’t I get to live a hundred years ago and meet such a maiden! The translator Tiina Puumalainen uses written language and addressing, which is why the verbal fireworks are sometimes awkward. Breaking the theatricality succeeds well in Kivinen’s direction. The actors comment on the scenes with the audience, and once they even grab a script from the front row viewer to witness their own memories.
Read moreGREAT MEN OF HISTORY WITH ENTERTAINMENTAlthough the American Steve Martin (b. 1945) is known in Finland almost exclusively as a skilled film comedian with a flexible face (e.g. Superhulttio, The Family Is the Best, Roxanne, The Bride’s Father, Hookfinger), he is a much more versatile man as a cultural ploughman. Well, he has also been noted in Finland for a couple of slightly more serious roles, such as the recently seen Grand Canyon on TV, but his career as a TV scriptwriter, short story writer and playwright has been left in the background here.His comedy at Picasso at The Lapin Agile , written as his debut in 1993, rose to Broadway a couple of years after touring smaller theaters and was then elevated to the heights. In 1996, Martin was awarded by the American Association of Theatre Critics as the best playwright and the best play in a Picasso comedy. Artist Rentals and the lord of theoryMartin’s play had its Finnish premiere in 1998 at the Tampere Theatre under the name Wild Rabbit’s Tavern, directed by Tiina Puumalainen and now entertained by the same name at the Helsinki City Theatre’s Studio Pasila. The common factor for these two productions is actor Eppu Salminen, Picasso in both versions.Since the 1990s, the play has aged so much that in some places the best-before dates have already expired, at least in the case of references to the millennium. Otherwise, its approach to the fundamental questions of science and art, sparkling with its wit, is completely timeless, and great men such as Pablo Picasso or Albert Einstein will not be erased from the pages of history in the meteor storms of shooting stars of all the world. (In Martin’s view, Elvis is a bit missing).In other words, the play takes place in a cultural tavern in Montmartre, Paris, about a hundred years ago (it is still there, by the way), whose “canteens” include, in addition to the aforementioned Picasso, fellow artists Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and a number of more anonymous middle-of-the-road figures. Of course, there are many kinds of wingmen and profiteers, some as patrons, some as mistresses.A few days later, a young aspiring physicist pops into the cafeteria, introducing himself as Albert Einstein and some of his incomprehensible theories as revolutionizers of the future. When Picasso, who is in his own turmoil phase, arrives, we get into a rather sparkling conversation in which two completely different kinds of creativity and creative madmen compete against each other. And of course, it’s not enough to just wrangle about art trends and the theory of science, they also talk about women, a lot. And the women about them.The soup is stirred up with his own scoops by Gaston, a member of the tavern’s equipment who is going through a sexual crisis due to aging, the half-sly sly art dealer Sagot, the charming “cultural groupie” Suzanne and, of course, the restaurateur Freddy, whose sarcasms have good accuracy. His girlfriend, Germaine, who works in a tavern, is from the same country. There is also a mysterious tramp from across the time zones, who sings a modern ballad “Are You Lonesome Tonight…” Accurate actingMartin has written about the dialogue that is both intellectual and hilarious at the same time, and on top of that, it jumps out of the framework of the play at appropriate points so that the audience can also be the subject. That kind of combination is often quite difficult to hold together, but in the Wild Rabbit tavern it works very tolerably.Director Mikko Kivinen, himself a very situational actor, has thrown in his own spices that appeal to Finnish tastes. At times, there is a risk of slipping into self-serving, i.e. meaninglessness for the play, but the group keeps the bridle tight enough that the hum does not get out of hand. Jari Pehkonen Einstein and Eppu Salminen as Picasso are in great shape, passing accurately to each other and shooting at the goal with great power. Pehkonen makes the most of Einstein’s iconic fluffy protagonist, including the audible tongue-in-cheek. Salminen makes Picasso a notch smaller, but recognizable. The rest of the gang doesn’t leave any holes in the whole either. Jyrki Kovaleff hosts the tavern in a mellow manner, the young women Pihla Penttinen and Helena Vierikko complement each other with contrasts, and the slightly older gentlemen Hannu Lauri and Tom Wentzel perform their roles with charisma and suitably edgy. You have to remember all the time that comedy is being made on stage. There is no point in looking for great historical movements in this tavern encounter, but it is nice to pick up gags that reach the present day.
Read moreWILD RABBITS’ TAVERN TRIP I wonder if we would dare to write about Jari Pehkonen – the Albert Einstein of the performing arts – that he acts disproportionately well. That would confuse masses, speeds and energies. In any case, Pehkonen plays Einstein in the Helsinki City Theatre’s Studio Pasila’s Wild Rabbit Tavern , and he does it brilliantly. Steve Martin, known as a film comedian, has set the events of his comedy in the legendary Le Lapin Agile in Paris.A miscellaneous group of historical figures emerge from the doors of the tavern in farcical style, the top of which are two young geniuses, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, who were only in their twenties at the time of the play in 1904. The comedy plays with time levels. Restaurant guests greet the new century with enthusiasm, latter-day messengers paint a more contradictory picture of the future, and we viewers know best, for better or for worse.
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