Review: Paradisdoktrinen
Theatre review: The Doctrine of Paradise – a morality disguised as an unbridled comedy
Is doom inexorable or do we still have a chance to save ourselves? In Teater Mesola’s production of Fabian Silén’s The Paradise Doctrine , morality and contemporary criticism bubble under a surface of crazy science fiction.
Somewhere, in a future and dimension hidden from us, God sits and complains. My man, my man, why have you abandoned me?
Wherever the all-seeing eye reaches, only pagans can be seen. And to top it all off, they have also finished the Earth and emigrated to Mars.
God’s only companion, the evolutionary theorist Darwin, tries to console us with the fact that everything has its time. Species and life forms change, become extinct and make room for new ones.
That doesn’t comfort God at all.
But suddenly, a news broadcast breaks the darkness…
CNN still broadcasts Breaking News from some lost satellite and now reports on the last two remaining on Earth.
On the outermost patch of dry ground in some corner called Finland, the cyborgs Adam and Eve fight on. Eve’s resigned “Oh, God, help us” sounds like a prayer and God is not slow to react.
Despite all the previous promises of free will, God decides to intervene – but with the cyborgs, things go a little wrong.
The result is instead a restart where the human being is recreated in a previously cached edition, as she looked in the old flesh-and-blood version anno 2017.
And in that guise, Adam of course meets Eva through an online dating service.
Both know that they are not facing a rosy future. Unlike us, they even have a date for the end of the world – but like us, they wear their wool socks despite their knowledge.
It’s the little life that counts, with all that it entails of both ego-obsessed display and anxious navel-gazing. And what is evident there is, as we feel, never good enough.
That life is what goes on while we are busy with other things and that approaching disasters usually result in an escape from reality is of course not something we are reminded of for the first time.
But the strength of the Paradise doctrine lies not in the observation itself but in the form.
A morality with elements of contemporary and science fiction
In The Comedy of Felix Life, staged by Teater Mestola a couple of years ago, Fabian Silén succeeded in the feat of letting Kauniainen meet New York in a production that echoed the neurotic liberation processes in Woody Allen’s films.
In The Paradise Doctrine , the play with different genres explodes in a veritable fireworks display of references. The Bible, religious morality, everyday drama, science fiction, parodies of science fiction …
Everything melts together into a nice soup with an emphasis on beauty.
Silén is a chapter of its own in the small group of Finland-Swedish playwrights. And decidedly one of those who moves most freely in the field of tension between the permanent and the trendy, local and universal.
Asking for a consistent logic on the event plane is useless here. The Paradise Doctrine is not a play for engineering brains wondering how cyborgs are kept alive on a globe where the infrastructure has long since failed.
Sensitive Bible interpreters do not bother either.
But for those of us who ignore this kind of acribi, Silén’s play is a witty and evocative play with creation myths, criticism of civilization and threats to the future.
At the pub with Knausgård and with Friedman under the bed
The Adam of our time hangs out in the pub with his spiritual imaginary friend Knausgård while his wife Eva stages the harmonious family life on a vlog while she sits in vain in a telephone queue for mental health care.
And in the human son the couple achieves, of course, lives none other than a self-proclaimed god.
A kid who grows up with Milton Friedman’s shadow under the bed and in his teens develops into a guy who flexes in front of the mirror and claims to be unbeatable and immortal.
Is the guy God or Trump…?
Or on a more general level: who was first?
God who created man in his image or man who created God in his image?
I will refrain from attempting to answer that question. And so does the Paradise Doctrine.
The central question is not where it started, but where we are going. And the answer is, of course: towards doom at high speed.
The contemporary satire is delicious, but the approaching catastrophe may make you laugh.
If we have time to think that far at all.
Disarming heimlaga
In the Paradise Doctrine , things go quickly with a vengeance.
The prelude is like a student-like cyber spex with Lidia Bäck’s whiny god figure and Martin Bahne’s rational Darwin in kilometer-long dreadlocks somewhere in a godforsaken (!) space hole.
And there on Earth, the half-robots Adam and Eva (Bahne and Iida Kuningas) fight their last shaky days among cords and striking hard disks in an equally awkward setting.
The doctrine of paradise moves unhindered in time and space without a hint of technology flirtation. It is deliberately low-budget that applies all the way: cardboard boxes, shadow theatre and miniature interiors in shoe box format.
Therein also lies a large part of the strength and charm of the production.
Big questions often end up in a somewhat pathetic and overly clear dead end. But in The Paradise Doctrine there is no room for grandiose effects or chest tones that rattle falsely.
The script does play wildly with references, but without making a big deal out of it.
You are free to find out what you have time for – but if you don’t have a hundred percent grasp of, for example, the creation story, Renaissance art or the popular culture of our time, you can still keep up.
And in the same way, Fredrik Lundqvist and Joséphine Wistedt from the Västerås Ensemble 4th Theatre skilfully navigate past all potential pretentiousness in directing.
Gods, cyborgs or old-fashioned flesh-and-blood humans – Iida Kuningas, Lidia Bäck and Martin Bahne portray them all deliciously, with masterfully dosed parodies of both what we recognize and what we think we know something about.
But above all, they remind us of our own situation.
The future is a dangerous place, so let’s play ostriches.