Review: Sydänmaa
IN THE LAND OF WINGLESS WILLOW GROUSE
Ari-Pekka Lahti writes Ostrobothnian mythology as a play with the primal power of a preacher
Kokkola is becoming a dramatically mythical place, as it has already played the lead role in two new Finnish plays this year.
First, Leea Klemola wrote her harrowingly absurd play Kokkola, now the youngest generation dramatist Ari-Pekka Lahti describes the story of his own family in Kokkola and Central Ostrobothnia in his play Sydänmaa.
Apart from the Kokkola background, these two works have nothing in common other than talking about the h.
Heartland is not really a play at all in the traditional sense of the term. The touching work chains together rough biographies, stories about life in the wilderness from the perspective of different generations.
It is like a swelling ballad about wingless “willow grouses” flapping in stubble fields and alder groves, or a revival meeting where devils are driven out of people with the power of a notch casting a spell.
As a debut play, Heartland has one often noticeable and typical feature. The play aims to give a voice to everything that has been dammed and piled up by its creator. The pressure is relieved with a large amount of steam.
In Lahti’s work, a tanned great-grandfather thrown into a prison camp speaks as a punk, a grandfather who shook hands with Yuri Gagarin , a father who got drunk at a zinc factory, and finally, the family’s first high school graduate, a contemporary voice.
The women of the family are Ostrobothnian stubborn and make their angular decisions that are unsuitable for the community. The bloody mother takes it and goes to rock the scrap dealer’s caravan. The disabled but beautiful sister destroys the most sacred values of Ostrobothnia and ultimately destroys herself.
Like a biblical threat, generation after generation continues the cycle of original sin and curse until they are set free by grace from above. You made fathers, let’s step with a taste of blood in our mouths.
The sister and her brother, today’s young people, are each other’s protective shields in the play’s most touching transport. They are driving to their dreams on their red moped. A brother in front, a sister in the back, and the way to heaven is open.
As a writer, Lahti is a great empathizer of the word. The intensity and power of his text run on the (genetic?) extreme scale that raises the flames of a preacher. Now the expression is not censored, burned, burned and brightened.
But he also writes deeply archetypal Finnish, a primal language whose beauty and gloom hurt.
He is a contemporary youth in the cultivation of v-words. Even the generation of the Civil War uses the expression “v” in their speech without a care in the world. It doesn’t work.
The play bears the emblems of the Barbie generation in its Neo-Brechtian alienation effect, in which things are distanced from outside oneself. This is going now, this is seeing and doing.
An extremely open personal state of mind and emotion is brought into the story. These are my family. I am the one who…
The viewer immediately sits on needles. So this must be true? Especially since the narrator-protagonist is played by the author’s cousin Jarkko Lahti. And how it acts! She opens up to her role and the text with burning absoluteness.
Heidi Räsänen, the director of the writer’s generation, has got her hands on a difficult job. He has had to solve how to transform the turmoil of the text, the anarchist zigzag of the structure on the time levels of three centuries, into a theatre.
Guidance is mostly successful in its task. The form of interpretation is as associative and open as the dramaturgy of the text. The stories grasp the hands that stretch out over time.
Karmo Mende’s set design does not make the director’s job easier. Sparsely planked barns are clumsy intermediaries of scenes. Why on earth do you have to constantly climb, act on the roof, when the audience is sitting in front of your nose?
Kiureli Sammallahti’s applied folk music recharges the emotions with insight.
The working group consists of young people who have just graduated from their theatre school or are still studying there, as well as veterans of the City Theatre. There is a great synergy in the performance, where at its best, the upright, radiantly sensual Ostrobothnian interpretation interpreted by Heidi Herala is intertwined with the bright-eyed sunshine of young people.
Jari Pehkonen’s clumsy scrap dealer, slick boss and headmaster even more horrible than Grimm’s fairy tales are countered by an innocent Sister who has been exploited in her irrationality. Laura Birn works with such delicacies that Sisko almost really gets wings.
The oldest of the three generations is played by the youngest of the bunch, Jari Virman, who is a strong talent in his expression. Jarkko Rantanen gets to interpret the next generation of socialists, warm in his roughness. Aku Hirviniemi makes an impressive double cast as both the neighbor’s lady and Sisko’s brazen sadistic man.
The sad role of the father is carried by Martti Suosalo, one of Finland’s most gesturically and mimic-wise actors. Now he had been let into too loose a trap. As a text, the father’s monologue, which is extremely fine (and long), becomes incomprehensible.
It is an important gesture that the City Theatre has given its Pasila stage as a mouthpiece for the new theatre generation. It’s interesting to listen to that sound. Every generation makes its first journey of search into itself, and so do these.