Review: Sydänmaa
HEARTLAND IS OUTRAGEOUSLY GOOD!
The ghost song was a success. In the auditorium, people laughed and cried with genuine tears. HEARTLAND is something completely different and appealing for the first time in a long time. The premiere of Studio Pasila at the Helsinki City Theatre on 15 September will be remembered even after the applause has subsided.
The air was thick with the excellent atmosphere of the 70’s Kom-theatrical and “Jussikylä-like” ideological storytelling.
After the premiere, the audience applauded, pounded the floor and invited the actors and the rest of the crew to the stage again and again. The confused-looking playwright Ari-Pekka Lahti received the applause with incredulous modesty. He deserved every applause, as did the rest of the crew. The chronicle of four generations in Lahti has found its audience.
Director Heidi Räsänen had been more successful in her work, and Laura Birn also achieved an incomprehensible feat as her daughter with cerebral palsy. Birn is new to the theatre scene, but he didn’t seem like a youngster in the harrowing and lovable role he played.
The performance was full of laughter and crying, as life should be.
The undersigned descendant of the Red Guards from Häme was struck hard by the Ostrobothnian ideology.
The dreamlike story moved in time from 1918 to 2004. To be awake, or asleep, with or outside? In addition to the movement of time, people also moved from one place to another: from Kokkola to Helsinki. Or those who “could” moved.
For a play, it is a peculiar implementation simply and far from the traditional “stage narrative” of theatre. The monologues followed one another and the tableaux supported them, shaking hands with the next monologue. The costumes and set design fit perfectly into the whole. The same goes for music.
For once, I have to say that the script is appropriate in this play. It is therefore worth buying and reading it before the start of the performance. Background information to create an atmosphere is not a bad thing. Although you can get into the mood even when it’s cold.
It still makes me wonder how such a young writer as A-P Lahti is, can write such a mature and complete text, without any major clichés or self-evident facts? The emotional charge and understanding of the human being is so deep that it is not at all surprising that there were sobs and bursts of crying in the audience at the most emotional moments. And it wasn’t a matter of boredom.
The tragic comic nature of the characters was credible in everyday life. Plain. Real people with the right feelings. Or with their insensitivity.
The greatest fire of ideas and complete lack of ideas. Pains of conscience and hunger for life.
All I can say is that this absurdly shaking play was a pleasure to see.
The mother, played by Heidi Herala, is a realistic child of oppressive religiosity, who has been ravaged by an unfortunate marriage. When he bluntly states about his new happiness “big.. “A scrap dealer is a man who knows how to value even old goods”, really hopes that this is the case!
On the other hand, Martti Suosalo’s role as a drunken father in the play goes from a moderately enthusiastic footballer to the other side of the field: a sick, old, lonely and bitter drunkard.
And both of these roles are much more full of a deep understanding of life, than pointing out the elimination.
The many roles of Jari Pehkonen and Aku Hirviniemi (scrap dealer, teacher, boss, mink farmer’s son, neighbor’s wife, priests, soldiers) were downright delicious.
Jarkko Rantanen’s communist grandfather was a sympathetic grandfather and Jarkko Lahti, as the son of the family and the narrator, seemed to be personally present in every word and expression.
Every role in the play is so full of nuances and they are written and acted out so well that it would be an excruciatingly lengthy job to dissect them into a jungle of words like criticism.
Hardly anyone who buys it thinks that the price of the ticket has been wasted in this play, so it’s worth listening to and watching this ghost song for yourself. And cry and laugh.