Review: Everstinna

Colonel – the passion of life

Heidi Herala and her Colonels heat up the cool and dark of autumn. The small stage of the Helsinki City Theatre is charged from the first entrance and the lines. So it’s about Rosa Liksom’s novel The Colonel and bringing it to the stage.

The director of The Colonel is Susanna Airaksinen and the dramaturg is Merja Turunen. Behind the play is a bunch of people who know what to do, what can be heard and seen in the flexible execution; The language, the dialect and metaphors, the sets, the costumes, everything is harnessed to reveal the colonel’s soul and serve the play.

Yes, the first line about the past and the future catches the eye of the colonel, Heidi Herala. The epic, which starts with a touch of humour, is immediately Lapland-like and somehow Lapland-like naked and at the same time rich.

We know that the book is based on the life cycles of writer Annikki Kariniemi and Colonel Oiva Willamo and their era before and after the Second World War. The footsteps of the war can also be heard in this play, as can the outlines of the ideas of the time. But the liberating thing is that the human being is at the heart of the events. In fact, history does not matter, nor do the people who gave the play its outline. The essence of this play is Heidi Herala’s female character and its creators. But an interesting framework and anchoring war and its actors provide the colonel’s environment.

The first half of the play, that is, the work, loaded the expectation, as the skilfully constructed opening steps promise everything with questions. The promises were fulfilled – the colonel grew into the passion of life, ugly and beautiful, a woman’s victory over life.

The Colonel, created by Heidi Herala, is part of the series Unforgettable Theatre Experiences. A woman’s life at its darkest, mental dependence, defenselessness in front of the world and a man, living in fear of tomorrow. These are the steps of the colonel, which Heidi Herala climbs mercilessly, slowly accelerating the tempos towards the last moment of the illuminated stage. The Colonel’s wife grows past the Colonel, towards her own creative inner self and her own life.

The Colonel collects easily earned superlatives, and for good reason. It would have been easy to attach the play to reality, but it (and the book) proceed detached from the facts and the lives of real people. Good. The set design, the referential people, everyone on stage is aligned. The voice of Santeri Kinnunen’s Colonel is chilling and seductive, the one that women should avoid from afar. But if you can’t, if you have too many wounds from men… The Colonel’s father, Uncle Matti and Vompakti, recorded by Rauno Ahonen, lived along.

How to say that? If you hadn’t seen this colonel, something would be missing from the experience department. The Colonel must be experienced. The Colonel, the real one, has earned her statue of Aavasaksa and Heidi Herala is a standing ovation!