Review: Metsäperkele
The life of a forest devil goes from crisis to crisis
The story of the Forest Devil at the Helsinki City Theatre is so amazing that it would not be boring even by making a play.
The Forest Devil tells the story of how a feisty son of an impoverished bourgeois family fights his way from a pharmacist’s assistant to a forest industry tycoon and a national power wielder.
He is the forest devil, or Gustaf Adolf Serlachius, played by Pertti Sveholm in the Helsinki City Theatre’s play.
Success in the early stages of industrialising Finland requires recklessness, perseverance, relationships and good luck. And in particular, it requires capital. Serlachius is always short of that.
Other industrialists – yes, men, because women are only good wives – invest with the family’s money, but the forest devil is holding on one bill of exchange at a time.
Serlachius’ first business ventures go awry: a beer brewery and a mechanical incubation of chickens are shattered on stage. Fortunately, the financier, friend Fredrik Idestam (Risto Kaskilahti) is long-suffering.
About the pharmacist
Become a factory owner
The pharmacist’s assistant advances to become the owner of the pharmacy, and in the end, the money from the sale of the pharmacy is enough to buy a rapids in Mänttä, which was still a remote wilderness during the famine year of 1868. At the same time, the relationship goes to Idestam, which considers the purchase of the rapids a fraud.
Walking alongside the Forest Devil is a loyal friend, a law student and finally lawyer Alexander Neiglick. Unlike the other central characters, Neiglick, played by Eero Aho , is a fictional character. The woman-oriented, funny, and always calm friend brings softer humour in contrast to Serlachius’s mesoring, and transforms his train of thought into a natural dialogue.
A groundwood mill will be built in Mänttä, from where the bales of grinding will be laboriously transported to the world by horses and waterways. Then Serlachius succeeds in lobbying the decision-makers of the Riksdag to run the railway inland. The railway secures the position of a shaky company.
For a moment, it seems that the tension is over and the rest of life goes smoothly. What do you have to fight a bit with the landowners in Mänttä.
But fate adds more fuel to the mill: as if life wasn’t uneven enough, the factory burns to the ground. However, the insurance compensation and the reconstruction that has been launched without listening to the creditors will take the company and the man forward again.
Explosive man of will,
A loving head of the family
Serlachius constantly puts everything on one card. When a company needs to grow, both the debt-driven economy and relationships become extremely tense. Serlachius is warm towards his wife Alice and children, who he found during his time at the pharmacy, but he does not have much time for family life.
A large fortune also brings with it the fear of losing it. Aging Serlachius becomes paranoid. On the other hand, he also becomes a patron. Cooperation with Axel Gallén, among others, begins.
At times, Serlachius becomes sensitive to pondering his motives: whether he has gone too far, whether success has been worth a hard life. He says that bad deeds can also be done, as long as there are more good ones. But this weighing can go terribly wrong, as evidenced by the play’s dark ending.
Serlachius’ extreme willpower helped him succeed at the time, but the viewer may wonder whether there is a place for people of similar character in today’s society.
Would Serlachius’ ambition have even been ignited if the welfare state had paved the way for the poor boy? What use would there be for a feisty woodcutter who abuses his loved ones in a country where everything has already been built? I wonder if the man would have just been frustrated and marginalized or moved to some part of the world where the daredevil capitalists are still frolicking.