A woman sits alone in a restaurant. Images flash in front of her eyes. Her whole life she has wanted to be something else: a sweet, pure little girl, a sexy bombshell, an attractive wife. Someone worth loving. But there’s always something wrong with her; she doesn’t know how to act the way a woman should. The voice of fate calls out: “You will end up alone.” Rage bubbles up inside her, erupting in violent, bloody visions. Tonight she must either turn in a new direction or face the ultimate dead end.
Saara Turunen’s powerful play progresses in a ferocious stream-of-consciousness, blending levels of reality into a color-saturated fresco. The pressures women face are given a stinging, concrete form, and childhood and adulthood melt into one another in a genuinely theatrical way. The play offers opportunities for a variety of interpretations and executions, and its open format encourages the director and the actors to bring their own original ideas to the work.
The play has been translated into English, German, Hungarian, Slovak, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Italian, Estonian, Czech and Russian. The play has been published in Mexico by the Paso de Gato Theatre Editorial. In addition to the Finnish productions, it has been produced at the Barcelona Theatre Institute (inv. to the Sala Beckett), the Sirály Theater in Budapest, the Teatro El Granero de Centro Cultural del Bosque in Mexico City (inv. to the Festival Cervantino, Guanajuato, Mexico) and as a radio drama at the Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR).
Date of premiere 25/04/2013
Press reviews:
“The playgirl pose clashes with fragile vulnerability in a naturally fatal manner in the character of the BunnyGirl (performed by the excellent actress Pavla Beretová). The obsession with contemporary drama gains (great) dimensions when the dramaturgy of Theatre Letí discovers an interesting text and when the stage director finds a quite inventive staging key to it.”
Michal Novák, www.i-divadlo.cz, May 3, 2013
“The fairytale character of a play about a dirty duckling is intermingled with violent fantasies of a young lady. … Specifically the impossibility to disengage from the sad merry-go-rounds of ones own life is the most tragic part of the Bunny Girl. Theatre Letí manages to successfully capture this with the use of parody, irony and comic distance from the displayed. “
Kateřina Vlčková, www.kulturissimo.cz, April 30, 2013
“The multifaceted, enigmatic heroine is played by Pavla Beretová who with grace and flair for various degrees of stylization can be funny and quite touching at the same time, as well as grotesque and understated in her acting. Her team-mates and opponents are presented by the members of the chorus with whom the author Saara Turunen gently parodies ancient theatre. …The director Natalia Deáková dramatically uses the audio screen similarly as in last year’s successful production of Interviews with Astronauts. The resulting production is an amusing and definitely not a shallow piece of art that entertains even when Turunen actually does not have interesting to say.”
Michal Zahálka, Economic newspaper, May 16, 2013
