Review: Sydänmaa

A new generation’s heartbeat plays in the heartland

Timo K. Mukka’s fierce primal power and film director Rauni Mollberg at his most powerful as its interpreter – they inevitably come to mind when you follow the young dramatist Ari-Pekka Lahti’s play Heartland.
And we can go even further, at least as far as Aleksis Kivi , when looking for points of comparison. That is a lot to say, but it is also the case that this northern EU country has not received such a gallant praise of Finnishness just yesterday. There would have been a need, though. It is a love song of a new generation not only to the heartland but also to the country of birth. One and the other had to dig out a handkerchief in the stands.

The matter is tackled through both pain and humour, and with a rare maturity. Lahti is fiercely and boldly tracing our spiritual heritage. In his own words, it is “the core that makes us Finns sensitive, big-hearted and at the same time so damn rough and jealous”.

The heartland, the wilderness of Ostrobothnia, provides a framework for the events, from where the legend of the willow grouse, the soul of an innocently killed girl, bursts into the air. And it carries all the way to this day and to congested Finland, which seems to be coldly trading both souls and bodies. The nectar of the North is cheerfully intoxicating, but also makes you fall into heavy drunkenness or knocks you down in the ecstasy of faith.
Is it the heartland that fills the mind with fear and disbelief and great longing. Who treads carelessly into the swamp of human conviction, gives the keys to conquering space, but nothing to replace the dreaded red scarf?
It may be, but when the music of the wilderness is played, it is heard without boosters all over the country. And especially if it’s tango…

In other words, Lahti has apt coordinates, and director Heidi Räsänen skilfully uses them in her first professional theatre work. The consensus is obvious, even though the dramaturgical structure is not easy, as it never is when a narrator is needed. The central character of the story, a young boy, acts as a seeker, guide and commentator. He marches his winged sister, his parents, his grandfather and his great-grandfather onto the stage and wants so badly to understand them and their motives, the time they lived in and also where guilt arises and forgiveness begins.

Kiureli Sammallahti’s music binds cinematic transitions and even simultaneous scenes, and is a strong mood creator and tension maintainer, from the Willow Grouse mythology to revival societies and tango bending.
The stage design is simple and patinated, using Finnish wood almost as a backdrop and only as a support structure for operations.

How strongly the author takes his own character to another time can be seen in the v-language, which he throws into the game as an effect that has moved from the present day. So it is not experienced as a freak, as one might think, but as a carefully considered code. The author’s cousin Jarkko Lahti interprets the role of the protagonist as an actor who is able to sign every word written in his lines, and who himself is eager to get a grip on the same background. In other words, the heartland has produced even more creative talent.
The performance is endearingly beautiful in the boy’s protective relationship with his “incomplete” sister, played by Laura Birn in a lyrically impressive way. Birn embodies the fate of the world’s other innocent, mistreated people, and the message of humanity’s injustices and rising up against them is thus clearly drawn.

Martti Suosalo also throws himself completely into the story. Her character is a charmer for a while, and after getting married, she is more of an “ex” in everything, both as a footballer, father and husband. Liquor takes away a man and his health. Suosalo interprets the position as a so-called “with his whole body” both comically and hurtfully, but at least in the premiere, the scene in which the father’s speech is about the porridge of a paralyzed person, a text that is difficult to understand, became an annoying problem area, at least in the premiere. There is no point in leaving a line that is not meant to be clear. If, on the other hand, the content is important, the public has the right to demand a solution in accordance with it.

Heidi Herala is a beautiful and noble woman from Ostrobothnia, whose character mixes toughness and sensuality. Herala is a nuanced comedy that stretches admirably according to its mission, and her and Jari Pehkonen’s joint honeymoon episodes are delicious. Pehkonen is in his element as a seductress scrap dealer.
Jarkko Rantanen is seen as the fierce and appealing grandfather, who has been slapped on the cheek by his worldview, and the grandfather’s father, a man of faith who ended up in a prison camp during the Civil War, is the soulful-faced Jari Virman. Aku Hirviniemi jumps into the female role, the neighbor’s lady’s dress, with devotion, and thus does his part to delight the audience excellently. He, like Pehkonen, has several tasks in the performance, which are by no means less empathetic than those mentioned.