Review: Hildur

Hildur – a successful new production at the Helsinki City Theatre

Theatre review / HKT invited to the premiere

“It feels like it’s the Hildur Weeks. I’ve been following the Hildur series since the first part was published. In December, I read the fifth part of the book series, a couple of weeks ago I met the creators and actors of the TV series, the Hildur TV series hit the screens on Monday 26 January and the play Hildur took over the Arena stage of the Helsinki City Theatre on 28 January 2026.

Hildur carries many interpretations

I’ve learned one thing from Hildur’s journey. I no longer compare the TV series or theatre adaptation to the image I have formed in my own head based on Satu Rämö’s books. The foundation of Hildur built by Satu is so strong that it can be used for a wide range of appealing interpretations.

Hildur first moved on to a theatre performance at the Turku City Theatre. The Helsinki City Theatre’s version features the same dramaturg, Satu Rasila, but she has created a completely new dramaturgy for Helsinki. In Turku, a combination story of three books had been devoured for the stage, but now the story of the play Hildur is based only on the first book in the series, Hildur.

The Arena stage works

The Arena stage in Hakaniemi has previously served as a cinema, and the premises still exude from that era. Auditorium rises only gently, the stage is quite small and the lobby space is cramped.

Built on stage, Ísafjörður consisted of video walls and a cairn of stones in the middle of the stage. If necessary, the Ìsafjörður police station was opened from the side wall, but the other settings were more or less imagined on stage. Perhaps not the most spectacular solution, but it worked very well when you threw yourself into the story.

The video did not reflect the sunny snow peaks. Instead, there was a sparkling, gloomy sea and black-and-white negatives of Hildur’s younger sisters Rósa and Björk. Their disappearance 25 years earlier is still Hildur’s greatest trauma, and because of the anniversary and the criminal case dealt with in the play, it makes her even more anxious.

Gloom and surprising humour

When the starting point is the Nordic Blue detective story, you can be prepared for someone to be murdered. Hildur’s story was familiar to me (and more than a million other Finns), so I knew who would escape their lives, but the realizations of the deaths still made me sick to my stomach.

Humour, on the other hand, came out of the blue. At the beginning of the play, Jakob, played by Paavo Kinnunen, arrived in Ìsafjörður on a bouncy flight. He was not a restrained, Finnish police trainee, but his inner world bubbled up like verbal fireworks for everyone to hear. This interpretation of Jakob also sunk completely into me in many other parts of the play. When it’s gloomy, it’s gratifying to visit the other end of the emotional register.

Throughout the play, there were witty jokes that tickled the nerves of laughter. Jari Pehkonen, who played a businessman from Reykjavik, performed a small solo part strongly, emphasizing his Mulqvist-like nature. For a moment, I didn’t know if this is one of the summer theater courting tricks that I hate, but then I came to the conclusion that nowadays you shouldn’t do anything but laugh at men like the character. In some realities, this kind of toxic male image is still admired or tolerated, but not on the same stage as Hildur!

The play Hildur is faithful to the book

The book Hildur is extraordinarily rich and its crime plot is multi-generational. It is the opening part of the series, where the background of the main characters is also carefully reviewed. Of course, the stage has had to be pruned, thinking about which elements and plot lines are best suited to the whole.

On the Arena stage, the focus was on the case of a serial killer and, of course, that too with a bit of a twist. Forensic pathologist Kirves-Hákon (Unto Nuora) picked hair out of the victims’ mouths time and time again, pictures of the murdered were on the police station’s case wall, and things were repeated enough to keep up with the plot even if you hadn’t read the book.

There are a lot of scenes, especially in the second half. The tempo is fast, in some scenes I would have liked to stay a little longer. I found myself thinking that this is great, that Hildur can make an arrangement like this. At the same time, I think that I am really interested in both Hildur and Jakob as characters, especially their humanity, which you can always get a little more into with each interpretation.

Hildur and Jakob

The scenes of the main couple are the best part of the show. Elena Leeve and Paavo Kinnunen make Hildur and Jakobi an equally strong couple. Hildur’s reputation is tough, it is emphasized in the opening lines, but she is very relatable on stage: stubborn, productive and sensitive. Jakob is also very comfortable with himself. She reveals her own pain, swaggerness (an adjective used in the play) and her insecurities, but she is not bothered by the ridicule of others for her knitting. The only thing that gets under the skin is the ex-wife and the custody dispute. The scene was excellently executed, Vappu Nalbantoglu’s interpretation in the video call made hairs stand on end even in the audience.

The supporting actors played several roles, of which my favourites were Sari Haapamäki’s Police Chief Beta and Sanna-June Hyden Guðrún. Unto Nuora deserves a special mention for the ensemble’s best use of voice.

Strong atmosphere throughout the performance

There was a strong atmosphere in the play Hildur. If you hadn’t known the plot in advance, you would have had to be sensitive all the time about what bad would happen next. You wouldn’t even know where, because director Tuomas Parkkinen skillfully used the entire space of the Arena Theatre.

The Nordic Blue atmosphere was created with lights and shadows, rolling video waters and a great soundscape. When the mind was gloomy, they jumped back to the surface, for example, by laughing at Jakob’s fear of death on the stormy sea.

There was a great hook at the end of the play. The stage is set for Rósa and Björk.”

Read the review with pictures here.