Review: Sydänmaa

UNLOADING THE BURDEN OF GENERATIONS

The Tampere Theatre has Leea Klemola’s play Kokkola in the repertoire. In the Helsinki City Theatre’s play Heartland , we are also in Kokkola and speak the Kokkola dialect throughout the play.

However, Sydänmaa, written by Ari-Pekka Lahti, is not so much an analysis of Kokkola as a touching story about the history of one family and the tight grip of the chain of generations. Heidi Räsänen Pasila’s direction for the stage plays with comedy, but gives room for emotions. Heartland is unusually sincere theatre, towards the future, which speaks directly to the audience.

The “beautiful but stupid sister” played by Laura Birn, who has cerebral palsy, is a fine and touching role. The viewer’s sympathy is on the girl’s side and the horror is great when she marries the owner of a sadistic mink farm.

A religious mother, played by Heidi Herala, finds a new sensual happiness in a scrap dealer’s caravan. Martti Suosalo’s father is a former best footballer in Kokkola, now a drunkard. But in the scene at the end, the father sits on the bench at his daughter’s wedding as a decadent alcoholic, and the son (Jarkko Lahti) directly asks the viewers for mercy for his father. Mercy comes, but it is brought by an intrusive preacher.
The boy also seeks grace and liberation from religious assembly. The evil is conjured out of the boy and he leaves screaming.
The imagery that makes use of the Ostrobothnian mindscape seems to claim that the only way to break free from the evil cycles of generations is through a liberating experience. In the play, the experience is at least formally religious.
A bold and touching play. It has the magic of theatre and the compulsion to tell a story. That’s how it should be.