Review: Taju
Ursula Salo’s acting takes a strong focus on the Helsinki City Theatre’s new production Taju. Salo will be on stage in the role of Taju Sallinen for almost the entire two-and-a-half-hour play. Intensely, touchingly and strongly, it is! The Sense is written by Liisa Urpelainen and directed by Laura Jäntti for the Pengerkatu stage of the City Theatre.
Taju is an intense, almost bloody depiction of the life of author Taju Birgitta Tiara Sallinen. The work is a story about the aging Taju in the Nikkilä mental hospital, where he begins to write a memoir about his father, the famous artist Tyko Sallinen. Taju wants to write the father out of his life and free himself from the father’s burden. The play progresses through flashbacks, and the focus on the stage is Taju’s childhood years together with his father and mother, as well as his memories of his scholarship years in war-torn Germany in 1943–1944.
Salo interprets the role of the writer Taju accurately. There is something extremely delicate in the interpretation and she also gets a lot of different nuances in her role. Salo’s acting is intense, even compressively understated, and he manages to bring such a dose of authenticity to his lead role that the audience startles.
Salo’s role work through Taju Sallinen’s life requires the ability to adapt. Salo succeeds in his role as a small, frightened child, a budding writer on a scholarship in Germany, and as a psychiatric patient writing his father’s biography in the Nikkilä mental hospital. Salo’s interpretation includes genuine presence, and she interprets Taju very naturally even as a child, without falling into easy solutions, with which she sometimes sees child roles being interpreted.
Taju’s story is tough and wild in many ways. Urpelainen’s text and Jäntti’s direction are fine theatrical art. One that is not only dark tones or heavy subjects. Memory and memories tend to be merciful to us. Life lived can be very different from life told or written. This seems to have been the case with Taju Sallinen (pen name Irja Salla) as well. He wrote a polished and embellished biography of his father, admired by his contemporaries.
The casting is as a whole successfully strong in Jäntti’s direction. Santeri Kinnunen as Tyko Sallinen is a successful interpretation of a man who sometimes behaves almost frighteningly aggressively and is grumpy. In the play, Tyko treats both his wife and daughter with contempt and belittling, invalidating their actions and existence. His relationship with women is hostile. Kinnunen has received a dose of frightening manipulativeness in her interpretation of her interpretation as the father’s already dead figure tormenting her daughter even in a mental hospital. Iida Kuningas as Taju’s mother Helmi is a loving and caring character. The king’s interpretation is also delicate and he manages to bring to the stage a touching mother figure who loves her child, but in the end she can’t do anything about the tormenting Tyko.
The play also has several successful supporting roles, the most delicious of which are the cabaret characters Albert (Rauno Ahonen), Herbert (Antti Lang) and Allie (Iida Kuningas), who Taju encountered during his years in Germany. Through suitably rough, sometimes even absurd humour, the work also gets elements that lighten it appropriately. Eero Ojanen’scompositions and arrangements give the performance a clear rhythm. There are also some really fast-paced and professional role changes between supporting roles on stage. I also don’t remember seeing such a fierce Santa Claus on stage before (Rauno Ahonen)…
During his years in Germany, Taju also meets several German soldiers. It is noteworthy how the opinions of German soldiers about the protracted war have already become anti-war and critical of Nazi Germany. One of the play’s most delicate and lyrical scenes also takes place at a German railway station, when Taju and a young soldier (Antti Lang) who is forced to return to the Southern Italian front fall in love. The scene is also chilling at the same time, and these contrasts make it memorable.
Antti Mattila’s set design is sparse, but it gives the story space to be heard, and the characters in the story and Sari Salmela’scostumes to be seen. And in a good and intense drama, you don’t always need so much scenery. The turquoise columns that match the color scheme of the time and the blood-red, spine-chilling paint running along the canvas of the final scene are impressive.
Sense keeps the viewer in its grip. SE takes us to empathize with the fate of the protagonist and to reflect through him and the darker sides of life than in the moment, the joy and warmth bubbling over even the smallest things in the midst of sorrow.