Review: Everstinna
The power and physical presence of Heidi Herala’s monologue on stage must be experienced for yourself – Helsinki City Theatre’s Colonel was a stunning theatre experience
Actress Heidi Herala’s amazing monologue left me completely speechless for a long time. The Colonel of the Helsinki City Theatre is expressive and impressive theatre. At Wednesday’s premiere, the reality depicted in Rosa Liksom’s novel lived and breathed.
Herala’s interpretation, his presence on stage, had a power that is difficult to describe. You have to experience it for yourself.
The Colonel is an artist’s depiction. Through one person’s life story, it brings out something very essential and hurtful about us humans and our time.
In the performance, the passionate love of the Colonel and the sadistic intimate partner violence she experienced were juxtaposed with the fanatical ideologies of the last century that required unconditional commitment and the horrific consequences of this commitment.
In many ways, The Colonel is a true love story of the century.
Likson has written his novel The Torne River Valley in Finnish, i.e. Meänkieli. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Herala’s interpretation was the logic and precision of the language used in it. The sentences unmistakably hit the mark in describing the psychological and physical reality of the author of the story.
The violence experienced by the colonel in her own life, the horrors of the depression of the 1930s and the Second World War were intertwined.
However, the accuracy of the tongue did not make it clinical. In his book, Liksom cultivates pitch-black humour, which is echoed by lush language. In Herala’s interpretation, this characteristic of language came out deliciously. The surprising twists and turns hit like from behind a tree, and the viewer had to be constantly vigilant to get a grip on the words.
According to the script, the performance was created on Herala’s initiative. Soon after the novel was published, he read Liksom’s interview about The Colonel and felt that he was on the verge of something touching and great.
The same enthusiasm must have caught on to Susanna Airaksinen , who dramatised and directed the performance, and the entire working group. Airaksinen’s direction, Merja Turunen’s dramaturgy and Herala’s acting are such a coherent and perfect whole that there is no need to analyse it further.
Johanna Puuperä’s compositions and sound design, Vilma Mattila’s set design and costume design, Aino Hyttinen’s mask design and Vesa Ellilä’s lighting design were part of the same almost perfect whole. The scenography was in line with the text. Everything essential was included, but nothing superfluous.
Well, perhaps I have to mention Ellilä’s lighting design here, in which the lights on the stage were masterfully used to create a visual counterpart to the sharply cutting language of the performance.
The Colonel’s role model is Annikki Kariniemi from Lapland. Born in 1913, Kariniemi was a prolific writer.
Kariniemi was married three times. Her middle marriage was to Colonel Oiva Willamo , who was 26 years older than her, and who commanded the Lapland Border Guard. Kariniemi has also described this stormy union in his novel The Anatomy of a Marriage.
The Colonel gave a grim picture of the position of women in Finland in the last century. The talented woman’s life was overshadowed by sexual violence experienced at a young age and violent intimate partner violence.
In the story, the Colonel’s life is also overshadowed by the early death of her father, the violent upbringing methods of her fanatical mother, and an extremely traumatizing childhood experience, a secret that the growing girl’s mind had hidden behind a wall of oblivion.
So why do we seek out relationships or communities that are harmful to us? And why is it so difficult to break away from such a relationship?
These are the key questions of the Colonel theme. The performance also offered at least one key to the story of the Colonel’s mind.
Of course, The Colonel is also a story of healing. The Colonel’s creativity blossoms and literary production begins in earnest when she is finally able to break free from her abusive relationship and enter into a new relationship with a boy who is decades younger than herself.
In the episode about the colonel’s healing, a 14-year-old boy makes love to his adult lover for the first time like a moose that has smelled heat, and immediately afterwards like an old goat who has experienced it all. The Colonel describes this act as really enjoyable.
The Colonel challenged us viewers to at least engage in an internal dialogue about right and wrong. I’m sure every one of us thinks that sexually abusing a four-year-old girl is a wrong, disgusting crime.
Similarly, we probably consider an uncle who starts a relationship with a teenage girl who is 26 years younger than him to be at least a dubious figure. Is the relationship between a middle-aged woman and a 14-year-old boy just as wrong?
A statue sculpted for Aavasaksa by artist professor Ensio Seppänen was erected in Kariniemi in 1990.
Kariniemi’s literary output has been forgotten for decades, probably because she was ahead of her time in sexuality. What suited the “colonels” of world literature in the last century, such as Henry Miller and co., did not suit a middle-aged female writer from Lapland.
We make the big decisions in our lives based on emotions. In a way, they are stronger than us, the result of millions of years of evolution.
In The Colonel, these deep emotions are symbolized by a swamp, a beautiful but immersive landscape of the mind. Art is a way to explore our relationship with our own emotions, and in this sense, too, The Colonel of the Helsinki City Theatre is good art.