Review of the « Dads » at Dramaten
You talk about toxic masculinity. It could also be called emptiness. Abandonment.
A ring of headlights floats over the stage. The men, draped in white fabrics, have the plaster face with ancient statues. They could be Socrates students in Athens, but the masked, black -clad dancer in the middle of the ring (Zizou Reinholdsson at the premiere) is a vigorous and living child of today.
Alexandra Pascalidou wrote the book which then became the play « The Moms » about the children, boys most, who die and kill in gang war and racism, and their mothers. In it we met the sadness and stories of despair. The sequel, the interview book « Where is the fathers? » is about men, the unsuccessful and/or absent fathers, often the men of the suburb. Now that it also gets a stage premiere, there are many of the interviewees in the Dramaten audience.
The men on the stage are antique to the roots but strikingly recognizable for us today – engaged in a kind of group call in the free care or at an institution, sometimes interrupted by a quiet meditation therapeutic, ironic but not only, and bizarre but meaningful dances.
Their Swedish has Many refractors. With Virtuo’s comic frenzy, Francisco Sobrado lives up to all our Latino prejudices. Razmus Nyström hides his incredible loneliness behind small silent gestures. John Njie vibrates with unused strength and talent and pours out of that source when he sings, powerfully well, while Magnus Roosman’s feelings of failure and inadequacy heal his speech ability. Everyone is looking for some kind of healing with each other. Except maybe Christoffer Svensson, who is very funny as a resolutely social improvement with naive solutions to everything and everyone’s problems.
One task has the others – to understand themselves. They are crowded with speaking time. The subject is never far from their childhood, the violence of the fathers and the indifference with some difficult -to -cure examples. The children they themselves have hurt are not here, but they speak to them. And the light ring over the stage flips, lowers and becomes a thorn crown over their lost group, abandoned as they are also by the father over all fathers.
Still there is here moment of closeness and joy. Memories that light up the dialogue. And wonderful outbursts of puppy games between adult men who dare to be there, in rest with their bodies – a masculinity so simple and beautiful in its diversity that it gives hope for the future after all.
Because it is a strange spectacle that occurs in Alexander Salzberger’s ingenious directing direction. Not directly a play or a story. Rather, by being so physical with their dances and wrestling in the obvious struggle against the male touch of touch, it wants it, and succeeds, creating an atmosphere of what is similar to life itself. We are drawn into it as in a common breath or a very early wordless memory of obvious safe closeness.
« I feel a feeling! » He exclaims who has never been to this before. We do that in the audience as well. When the ensemble crazy surprisingly bursts into the most beautiful of spring songs, this is the hope we need. The drama surpasses itself and delivers it.
Read more stage reviews here and more texts of Ingegärd Waaranperä here.
