Review: Näytelmä joka menee pieleen

NOW IT’S OKAY TO LAUGH

The play The Play That Goes Wrong, which was created in 2012 as a graduation project by three theatre students (Lewis, Sayer, Shields), was initially performed in a London pub, but word of the hilarious farce soon spread in such a way that audiences all over Europe have since been able to laugh at it. The play was first performed in Finland by the Tampere Theatre in 2016, and since then it has been seen elsewhere as well.

I have a sceptical attitude towards comedies, because I too often have to sit serious and bored while watching a performance. Writing humor is difficult, and performers must master the noble art of timing, which is one of the most difficult things about acting. But the performance, which premiered on the Arena stage of the Helsinki City Theatre, began to break down the protections from the very first minutes.

According to its name, The Play That Goes Wrong went wrong so that I sat on my bench laughing heartily throughout the performance – and during the applause as well. And that’s how it had been rehearsed under the direction of Pentti Kotkaniemi, that the seams were big, the timings failed, the characters disappeared or there were two of them competing for the stage space. Everything that can go wrong, also goes.

Mobility on stage is limitless in absolutely everything. Anything can turn into anything.

According to the introduction, a murder takes place in a mansion, which is then investigated, but before the murder, before the first line, many things have time to crumble into a farce. Through the play, the audience sees the structures of the backstage and the stage machinery behind them. They will also become part of the performance. As well as the props, which play the role of a kind of baton throughout the play. Among other things, the viewer follows the progress of a keychain and a drinking glass in extremely tense situations, and constantly observes the dangerous situations that arise from time to time. The plot is completely secondary.

In the script, director Kotkaniemi writes that theatre is the most childish of all art forms. And sure enough, I found myself thinking about that very thought during the performance, when I remembered the plays that my children often played and that I got to watch. Now the Helsinki Metropolitan Polytechnic Drama Society rushed to the stage with its performance “Murder at Haversham Manor”. And it is precisely this play-within-a-play pattern that interestingly puts the cast in two lights.

This time, you can bow deeply to the acting. As a master of timing, Santeri Kinnunen takes on the role of a police inspector, sometimes as a mysterious or self-consciously rock-hard detective hero type. His keen gaze scans the venues and the inhabitants of the manor, of whom Matti Rasila’s butler is excellent in his simplicity. This character is not startled by anything at all. The fiancée (Linda Wiklund) of the murdered lord of the manor (Risto Kaskilahti) has to fight for her role with the stage manager (Eija Vilpas). Vilpas takes on the role of the fiancée in a passionately amateurish manner and conquers as such. Joel Hirvonen has been given the task of breaking the boundary between the audience and the stage as the brother and gardener of the murdered man, and this actor from the Drama Society slyly thinks he can elicit extra applause for his performance.

And I almost want to thank the set designers as well, because they participate so actively in the performance, downright frighteningly dangerous. The set design designed by Peter Ahlqvist is excellent.

Now is the time to go and get a laugh at the theatre, because it is so rarely available.