Review: Nainen ja anjovis

PRAISE OF THE NORMAL AND THE MUNDANE

Sinikka Nopola’s lyrics make you laugh on the stand-up stage

The Helsinki City Theatre continues to grow. Studio Pasila’s café foyer is already the eighth performance space after Thursday, when Heidi Herala’s monologue performance was premiered.
Herala has compiled the Woman and Anchovies evening from seven collections of Sinikka Nopola’s writings, some of which use the Tampere dialect. The performance also features Herala’s musician son Lauri Maijala, who has made strong and light Chaplin-style music to rhythm and support storytelling.

Guaranteed

Heidi Herala’s interpretations make the viewer feel comfortable and enjoy themselves – guaranteed. Studio Pasila’s café stands are full and guaranteed to make you laugh night after night. Sinikka Nopola’s excellent texts can be read and heard several times. But almost as much of the success is based on Herala’s strong and competent performance.
An actor must have a long and varied career in the background before he dares to step in front of an audience alone to perform a full-length theatre evening. And even after a long experience, one must apparently still have the enthusiasm and arrogance to undertake such a test of one’s own evidence.
Heidi Herala has approached her performance with the naturalness and lightness of a comedian. The viewer feels as if they are dating an acquaintance.
“What are you laughing at?”, he asks the person sitting in the front row suddenly. “There is Hämeentie in Helsinki, but what is there in Tampere?” The performer’s question will be answered from different parts of the audience. “There is such a delay here, because the second part of the presentation is so much shorter than the first… Not at all!”
The performance situation works very well, naturally.

A challenge?

However, the safe choice is the easiest possible. Sinikka Nopola’s stories depicting everyday life easily make the audience laugh.
The everyday life of a housewife, a woman facing the challenges of the advertising world or, for example, a person searching for her identity in the face of the ?majority? There are easy subjects in front of the wall.
Sinikka Nopola’s funny ?Tampere identity? It works well outside the province as well. However, the Häme-Suomi dictionary seems strange in Southern Häme, far from Tampere. I also have to say that Tampere Häme really is something different from the actual Heart-Häme here in southern Häme.