Review: Taju

Father and daughter on stage

                      The last work of the writer Irja Salla, whose real name was Taju Sallinen, was the autobiographical Father and Daughter (1957). In it, the daughter talks about her relationship with her artist father, Tyko Sallinen (1879–1955). Its tone is conciliatory and far from what Liisa Urpelainen’s play Taju describes the relationship to be. It is a well-known truth that daughter Taju embellished things very much.

                      The play Taju is an interesting psychological study of a child’s abuse between parents. The play is based on facts by Taju Sallinen (1907–1966)

about the reality of life. The girl was born in Sortavala and lived her early years with her mother there and in Vyborg. However, her father picked her up to his artist’s studio in Hyvinkää, but then took her to Helsinki. Taju Sallinen became interested in wartime Germany and visited the country, including its fornicating life, experienced a beautiful love, returned home and spent his last decades in Nikkilä Hospital. The mind could not bear all the brutal realities of life.

                      The play Taju premiered on 10.11. On the Pengerkatu stage of the Helsinki City Theatre under the direction of Laura Jäntti . The title role is played by Ursula Salo, who works with full intensity and precise acting. Antti Lang and Rauno Ahonen transform in an instant, especially when accompanied by pianist Eero Ojanen. The role of Tyko Sallinen is played by Santeri Kinnunen and the mother is played by Iida Kuningas. The play does not stagnate, as Urpelainen’s text has given the director the opportunity for a brisk interpretation.

                      Ursula Salo captures the experiences of a fearful and affectionate child, which in a very understandable way messes up the life of an adult woman. She has no skills to form relationships, and in the end, we are at the beginning of the play – in a hospital where the writer Irja Salla is frantically tapping on a typewriter.

                      There are many truths in life: real and imagined. This play shows that in a harsh way. There is a “glass childhood” in the mind, as well as hidden truths, such as the cause of the mother’s early death. Her father denies Taju even every dialect word from her childhood, not a single “I”.

                      Irja Salla’s dozen or so works tell fiction and memoirs, the genres of which are mixed. However, Salla was understandably one of the favourite writers of the 1940s, at a time when many people could find similarities between a harsh upbringing, happiness and disappointments, and uncertainty.