Helena Anttonen wrote a comedy about old age, which did not yet come
Screenwriter Helena Anttonen (b. 1952) immediately had a very strong image of the play Another Bottle of Cava. In the first part of the play, four friends came to an agreement that they would establish a joint retirement home in Portugal. In the second part, the tension is whether the four will stay together.
“I thought that there was no stretching of what it was like to live in a nursing home. Not arguing about washing dishes, but new questions, temptations and offers that life has to offer,” Anttonen says.
In the play, the women have lived in Portugal for at least a year, and in that time they have not aged at all. On the contrary, they wake up to the fact that they are not old, but they still do not live a full life. The play takes place at a turning point, where life begins to seduce again.
“In the play, there is an awakening to the fact that death did not come. If you stay healthy, old age will not attack you with a gun, but it will creep into our lives quite slowly and unnoticed,” Anttonen ponders.
The second bottle of cava is a sitcom and a single-stage performance. “When you stay in the same place all the time and nothing earth-shattering happens, the set design and the spirit of the place are important,” Anttonen says.
Designed by Katariina Kirjavainen , it is largely based on the set design of the first part, although in the retirement home, the architect’s handprint has given way to practicality. The design furniture has been sold in a lack of money, and the pallets have been replaced by their own efforts. Everyday life has entered the idyll of the retirement home, not only in terms of relationships but also in the stage image.
The text must make you laugh
Writing the second part of the play felt fun and easy to Anttonen from the beginning. The features of the genre of tragedy were out of the question, and therefore no one dies or becomes seriously ill. Anttonen wanted to stick to the spirit of comedy.
Because the women were familiar and loved, their temperaments began to speak as if by themselves. “I thought about how I would collide characters who all have me in them. That’s why I was amused by taking my own qualities to the test, and that’s probably where it started,” Anttonen recalls the early stages of writing.
Enthusiasm for writing the sequel was also heightened by the talented female quartet Heidi Herala, Jaana Saarinen, Aino Seppo and Eija Vilpas , who became familiar to the Helsinki City Theatre, as well as director Milko Lehto, who acted as a reliable home critic.
After graduating as a dramaturg in 1977, Anttonen has also worked as a director and theatre director. Over the years, dozens of manuscripts have been written, including on serious topics. “I know that there is always frivolity between the lines, no matter what I write about,” Anttonen describes.
He says that comedy has to make you laugh, because you can’t theorize about a sense of humour. Then you write next to yourself. “If you feel amused or smile, you have to trust that something else will make you laugh as well,” Anttonen explains.
In this kind of comedy, Anttonen subconsciously cuts out tough subjects: “This is aimed at women my age, who are the audience that maintains and pays for the theatre. However, there are some things that are close to the bar.”
More stories of aging women
When the first part of the play, A Bottle of Cava and the Sun , was performed in the autumn of 2018, the stories of the elderly women were hardly told. The play was inspired by a call from an actor who said that he and three other women had become unemployed when The Unknown Soldier was added to the theatre’s repertoire.
The idea for the story of the play began to emerge at a party, where Anttonen asked how the women would like to spend the last ten years of their lives. “It’s funny that the core was such a paradox. They wanted both social and individual old age. Anything but sitting in an institutional bed or a studio apartment,” Anttonen says.
This gave rise to the idea of a community and women who choose each other and a shared, shared old age. Anttonen wanted to write about women who have a big bag of life experience. There are marriages, children, careers, successes and disappointments in life.
Anttonen hopes that older women would guide and write the stories of older women themselves: “When women have lived a long life, a sense of humour arises from a considerable amount of sense of proportion and life. I hope that a more nuanced old woman’s voice will be heard, without excluding fun and humour.”