Review: Sydänmaa
In the heartland from one generation to the next
WING BREAKS AROUND THE WORLD
Ari-Pekka Lahti from Kokkola has written a very personal play, the story of his own family. It covers four generations, from a great-grandfather who ended up in a Red prison camp to a pair of siblings lost with the present day. The setting is a small town on the outskirts of Kokkola.
My great-grandfather ended up in a Red prison camp and ended up as a preacher in Sweden. My great-grandfather was a good communist, who mourns the collapse of the great and powerful. The father, on the other hand, succumbs to booze, and the son, a playwright himself, struggles in the cross-currents of today’s values. And then there is the sister, “cerebral palsy but beautiful”. This expression is used many times and the question arises whether a disabled person has no intrinsic value other than being beautiful.
Lahti, who studies at the Theatre Academy, says that she speaks for a small person. The text started from the ideology of his own generation. The grandson of a convinced communist wanders in the temptations of Itäkeskus, penniless.
The ideas of today’s people are sports cars and expensive clothes. Some have money like garbage and so-called. Ordinary people live elsewhere dreaming of a summer cottage or a lakeside sauna. Some fall for booze and start singing in karaoke bars like the boy’s father.
According to Lahti, heartland means a distant place, a wilderness, to which a person has to travel a long and arduous distance. It can also mean a place that can be found inside a person’s head and that is not always easy to peek into.
Heartland is represented in the Kokkola dialect, which gives Ostrobothnian local colour. The play exudes youthful enthusiasm and ideology, which forgives small shortcomings. The story is frenzied and there has been a great need to say something. Stories and centuries overlap each other, and the powerful proclamation of preachers hovers over everything.
Above all, Sydänmaa looks like its young writer, which is emphasized in many places. At the beginning, a young man who enters the stage introduces himself: I am the author of this play. In fact, he is the author’s cousin, actor Jarkko Lahti, who plays the author. Youth is also reflected in an unnecessarily large number of words beginning with a “v” and in the expressions “this goes…” and “this makes me now…”
The young people in the play, the boy and his sister, are lost in the middle of it all. Her sister with cerebral palsy has been bullied at school, but she has a strong will. Before it is defeated in the city, where he goes in search of his fortune. The son, the first student in the family, goes to Helsinki to study, but the work just doesn’t go smoothly and he falls into a mute bystander.
The working group consists of young people who have just graduated from theatre school or are still studying, and there are also old veterans on stage. Jarkko Rantanen is a stable communist grandfather, Martti Suosalo is a drunken father and Heidi Herala is his wife. The most delicate performance is given by Laura Birn as the sister, who acts as if she were bloody. Together with his brother, he sings the tango Satumaa at the end, which definitively interprets the essence of Finnishness.
Director Heidi Räsänen manages to keep most of the strings in her hands despite the difficult task.
The Helsinki City Theatre’s Studio Pasila presents a play that has a lot to say about Finnishness, the burden of centuries and original sin, but also forgiveness and mercy.