Review: Nainen ja anjovis

Theatre story: The Woman and the Anchovies

Your wonderful comedy Heidi Herala will take you to the wind at the City Theatre’s Studio Pasila. The monologue, based on Sinikka Nopola’s excellent texts, is an absolute boost to the polar night.

It has only been a matter of time before Sinikka Nopola’s witty Häme stories and short stories find their way to the stage as a full-length performance. Heidi Herala has taken up a fun challenge. That’s good, because he has a phenomenal sense of comedy and the text is like it was written for him. The performance is accompanied and accompanied nicely by musician Lauri Maijala.

The Woman and the Anchovies begins in Studio Pasila’s lobby bar, almost without noticing. Herala and Maijala hilarious sneak out from behind the bar onto the stage, and the counter system for rinsing beer glasses becomes the subject of the first story. As befits the genre, Herala’s first line is “Mää….” After a thirty-second pause, the story begins to flow. Herala is great at playing with the audience. Humour and contact intersect between self-irony, arrogance and gentleness. The infatuation is not diminished by the fact that Herala is a beautiful and upright woman with a capital n.

The performance includes some of Nopola’s best, some of the stories familiar from Helsingin Sanomat’s Monthly Supplement. Peculiar Häme humour and absurdism arising from everyday observations flourished. In one story, a woman neurotically encourages her son to play ball sports. He becomes obsessed with round balls, so on the ball court, the boy grabs the strings of a flying hot air balloon and flies away. In the title story, the anchovy jar takes on metaphysical features. From the mysteriously disappeared anchovies, an entire philosophy of life is born. The Tampere dialect also plays an important role, and Herala and Maijala make a fun couplet out of its characteristics.

There is also the story of a battered woman who tries to boost her self-esteem by buying a used crystal chandelier. Such a thing also swings from the ceiling of Studio Pasila. The melancholic and self-deprecating atmosphere is summed up in a beautiful song. In the end, however, the woman decides to return the crown, because it is as worn out as she is. Yet another skilful demonstration of a genre in which comedy goes hand in hand with compassion.

Of course, organising a performance in Studio Pasila’s lobby bar brings a relaxed atmosphere, but the seating solution has its problems. The visibility is not the best possible and the viewer sitting in the back has to reach out. The warm atmosphere still carries on. The Woman and the Anchovies is an absolute boost to the polar night and a real victory for the lovely Heidi Herala.