Review: Eila, Rampe ja palvattu onni

Clever performance

We Tampere residents were laughed at again, this time all the way to the capital, at the Arena of the Helsinki City Theatre. Even the opening lines of the play Eila, Rampe and the Adored Happiness caused bursts of laughter at the premiere. The Tampere dialect isn’t so much fun now, is it? The people of Manse don’t think it’s a dialect at all.

Eila, played by Heidi Herala , is a rather talkative, honest woman. Ilmari Saarelainen Rampe, on the other hand, is an ordinarily happy man. The couple’s Likka (Leena Rapola), on the other hand, sometimes suffers almost from the pain of the world, but dreams of an ordinary everyday life. Sinikka Nopola’s play is a sympathetic, endearing and insightful praise of ordinariness and everyday life. One of the messages of the play is that difference is strength (just like a certain Tampere identity).