Review: Le Coq – taistelu ravintolasta

Le Coq – layers of sketches

The Helsinki City Theatre had the hilarious premiere of the play Le Coq – The Battle for the Restaurant on Thursday 6 February. Heikki Vihinen and Timo Kahilainen’s theatrical soup is easy to catch up with, after all, masterchefs and cooking competitions are the number one chain of TV entertainment.

What did we see or, more specifically, experience? A French star cuisine that has lost its power and its customers. The master chef was Jouko Klemettilä alias Maxmilian von Salmi and the waiter of the older generation was Kerstin von Salmi alias the unbeatable Eija Vilpas. The restaurant has a lot of debt, no customers at all and great memories. Vihinen and Kahilainen know how to cook sketches and where they are cooked from.

The plot consists of mocking fun at the expense of cooking entertainment. After all, we’ve been following reality TV art with many buckets in recent years. In the play, the Michelin-starred French culinary mastery is a link to reality, i.e. the many ways in which food can be approached. At Le Coq, any food is given a provenance and a French name. Pänika wine becomes more sophisticated, bag soup develops, and so on.

Le Coq is a collection of verbiage, very fast-paced and events that have no roots. A bit like a French braid; You just collect the strands in a braid and oops, suddenly it’s a finished hair braid.

If you start longing for traditional logic and plot-driven progression of the play, Le Coq will certainly not satisfy you.

But if you want to enjoy uninhibited verbiage and good stage types well acted, Le Coq is good evening company. This theatrical play rests on actors. The Estonian food critic in the character of Riitta Havukainen was of course overkill, but it was funny as it was. I wonder if the choice of language originates from the early 90s? The real jerk is Pertti Koivula’s rat exterminator, a rooted, Finnish guy who is always loved. The hefty rat prey went smoothly (yök)! And then there’s the Russian half-brother who almost spews out of outer space, like straight out of an 80’s hit. Heikki Hela was swinging well in his wolf fur. There was also a lawyer in the play, Kaisa Hela.

However, the icing on the cake of this spectacle is the chef trainee, Esa Kynsi, who appears straight from the card book. Jarkko Niemi’s chef is at his best in his simplicity, as the young people say. He is just the right kind of caricature for his age, doing his own, yet effective. Good food was born from the so-called about your own needs, five about the mongers of French cuisine. Jarkko Niemi’s gestureless replication in the midst of linguistics was very effective.

Le Coq is modest in its impossibility, yet full of silliness. Despite the food taunts in this play, I suspect that the public still takes TV cooking seriously. But the audience had fun, innocently. You can laugh at the theatre…