Review: Everstinna

The amazing Colonel comes to life as interpreted by Heidi Herala.

When Heidi Herala , an actress at the Helsinki City Theatre, had read Rosa Liksom’s Colonel’s Review in Helsingin Sanomat, she had rushed to the store to buy the book, read it and immediately called Rosa Liksom to inquire who owned the rights to the play. The next step was for the theatre director to tell him that he wanted to play this role as the Colonel.

I’m not surprised at all. The Colonel is a fantastic book, Rosa Liksom’s seven-year main work, a fictional work written in Meänkieli based on the story of Annikki Kariniemi-Willamo-Heikanmaa (1913-1984). You can read my praise for the book here KLIK.

I have listened to Rosa Liksom on several different occasions and she has told me that she wanted to depict the rise of National Socialism and how it can be explained that people get involved in extremist movements. Another major theme in The Colonel is domestic violence and its psychological background.

The colonel’s way of looking at history is incisively accurate. The far right is on the rise again throughout Europe. How easy it is for anyone to start looking for answers in some big and powerful movement. How suddenly cruelty becomes commonplace. Bringing this work to the stage is talking about things out loud.” The Colonel’s director and dramatist Susanna Airaksinen.

As a book and also as a play, The Colonel is a one-night journey into memories. The Colonel is an old woman in her wood-fired cottage in Lapland, who is going through the events of her life and her own choices. Her path has been filled with ideology and sensual passion, but also with the horror of an abusive relationship. In her story, however, the colonel is an actor, still proud of her decisions. She talks about her childhood, her relationship with the colonel and the Nazi era, and her union with a new man. At some points, he justifies his decisions, but does not explain, and does not regret it.

The play’s working group said that they had been thinking about different solutions for the realization of The Colonel. Should the other characters of the Colonel be brought in as physical actors or how would they be introduced? They had decided “not to make this play a regular one”, so only the colonel is on stage and the other people are either voiced or sweatered. The solution is brilliant, the voice of the colonel is Santeri Kinnunen and the voice of the colonel’s father, Uncle Matti and Vompakt (Konrad von Bagh) is Rauno Ahonen.

Vilma Mattila , who was in charge of the set design, had conjured up a Lapland swamp landscape with steaming eyes and stunted trees on HKT’s Small Stage. Elsewhere was the colonel’s cottage, where people always returned to the armchair to take a breather from the memories of their previous lives. The set design was visually impressive and worked excellently. I’ll also mention the excellent airplane implementation!

The Colonel is the biggest role of my career. “- actress Heidi Herala at the Helsinki City Theatre’s autumn season presentation 13.8.2019

The play begins with the Colonel’s entrance. She is wearing a bathrobe with glittering decorations on her chest. He wears a Lapland hat and sunglasses over his eyes. The step is shaky. In the first lines, the breaths of our language can be heard strongly.

At the premiere, Heidi Herala’s strong charge for the role of the colonel could be sensed all the way to the back rows of the audience, her intensity throughout the two-hour play was at its peak.

The role requires quite a bit of transformation, sometimes in the story of the colonel we return to the age of four, sometimes we are in our seventies and everything in between. Some stages of the story Heidi Herala narrates with frenzy and screaming, in others she lies silently still. What spoke to me the most were the parts where he calmed down to tell his feelings, to really bring depth to the colonel’s life.

Just as Rosa Liksom (born 1958) has said that she could not have written when she was younger than The Colonel, I believe that now was the perfect moment for Heidi Herala (born 1960) to throw herself into the role of the Colonel. Her eyes twinkled as a young girl, and she was equally able to bring the colonel’s lived feelings to the stage with great credibility.

For me, the play reminded me of my strong reading experience again. The stories and lines of the play are straight from the book, but the dramaturgical emphasis was slightly different from my experience. There was breathtaking madness on stage as I read the book really seriously. It was interesting to observe the differences in interpretations.

I recommend The Colonel to both those who have read Rosa Liksom’s The Colonel and those who have never heard of the book. Especially for history lovers, those interested in relationships and those who love spoken plays.

At the end of the premiere, the entire audience rose to applaud Heidi Herala’s strong performance as bravo shouts echoed. On the way home, Lili Marlene plays as an earworm.