Review: Katrina

The musical Katrina is a breathtakingly beautiful depiction of a woman’s life in the archipelago

When Lilla Teatern stages Sally Salminen’s successful novel Katrina from 1936 as a folk music-inspired musical, it becomes a deeply moving theatre experience.

On an enchanted summer night when the youth’s zest for life is sprouting and the air is full of music, the young Katrina (Emma Klingenberg) meets the charming Johan. Katrina, who has never left her hometown in Ostrobothnia, is impressed by this stranger who plays so beautifully and who has seen the world as a sailor. When he offers her to become his wife and come with him to his stately house in the Åland archipelago, she accepts.

But when they arrive, the stately house is a poor cottage, and Johan himself is a little-respected slacker – and the same must surely apply to his wife, the locals reason. And they have barely moved in when Johan announces that he is going out to sea again, and will be gone for the rest of the year.

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Beautiful folk music tones

It is a tremendously moving performing arts experience when Lilla Teatern stages Katrina as a musical directed by the theatre’s artistic director Jakob Höglund.

Sally Salminen’s novel has been dramatised by Kaisa Lundán and has newly composed music by Aili Järvelä, who is on stage with Ulriikka Heikinheimo and Senni Valtonen. Together, they tell Katrina’s story with beautiful folk music-inspired songs and pithy speech scenes where they jump in as family members, neighbors or other residents of the archipelago village.

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