Review: Valtakunnan häirikkö
Vennamo saves his country and his people
Political satire is funny or destructive. Some political celebrities settle into this genre better than others. Undoubtedly, Member of Parliament, Party Leader, Minister and Customs Counsellor Veikko Vennamo is one of the best in this pattern. This has been achieved by his devoted personality both in front of a small population and in quarrels with his eternal rival, President Kekkonen. The originality of Vennamo’s personality and his untingling ability to be heard and seen have been conducive to sparking juicy stories about Vennamo both during his lifetime and afterwards.
Henri Kapulainen, the man of twenty plays, has now penned the play The Kingdom Troublemaker, which premiered at the Helsinki City Theatre for the beginning of the autumn. The play runs in a chain of more than 30 scenes from the rise and fall of Veikko Vennamo’s (Pertti Sveholm) political biography of Veikko Vennamo. Sveholm presents himself exhilaratingly as a man who looks like Vennamo, and whose Isthmus idiom flows very well. Vennamo’s clan naturally includes his wife Sirkka (Leena Uotila), whose position as a political background influence remains at the level of fuss in many places. Uotila is not shy about showing obvious upswing in his role.
An indispensable grandpa fell
Eino Poutiainen (Jari Pehkonen), a man from North Karelia, rises to the parliament on his grandpa fell and experiences an embarrassing decline. Despite the indicative slipping into his own pocket, Poutiainen feels sorry for him. Pehkonen makes use of his own North Karelian identity so heartily. Pekka Huotari , on the other hand, interprets several roles, but almost all of them have a squeaky country man as the basic type. Eija Vilpas gets to work in many ways, but especially in the ranks of the SMP. Vilppa’s characters remind us to move from one scene to the next. In this way, the illusion of reality is broken and the events are transferred to a kind of theatre troupe’s play about the lust for power and the most traditional methods of politics.
Even though The Troublemaker of the Realm is a full show at times, it ties in so many historical facts that it also builds a picture of the times.
In The Troublemaker of the Realm, one can ask where the line between the real and the imaginary lies. The answer is in the viewer’s head. If you want to believe, you can, for example, get a clearly packaged dose of the means by which Kekkonen purposefully climbed to power and maintained it for about thirty years. The reference to the war guilt trial alongside other national trauma is momentarily intertwined with the story. Kapulainen knows the means of the play, and Raila Leppäkoski as a director knows the possibilities that the written text and excellent actors give way to on stage.
A self-respecting settler
A major role in Veikko Vennamo’s activities will be played by ASO, the Department of Settlement Affairs of the Ministry of Agriculture. And here we come to the actual theme of the play: the binding of the Finnish people to land even after the war. Vennamo’s view was that even a small piece of the fatherland under the fingernail keeps the people away from socialism. The SMP’s “blood-curdling” election victories, which caused many heads scratching, annoyed many prominent politicians. Vennamo simply could not be overthrown, because he or the mass power engineered by his political vision nevertheless emerged from somewhere.
Kapulainen has skillfully based his play on historiography, the images of the Finnish people and the merits of Veikko Vennamo as the voice of a low-income and honest people. He is often shown to be a bit comical in his appearance, but ideologically clear. Based on the key line at the end at the latest, Vennamo must be considered a kind of savior of his people. What would the people of the wilderness and remote villages have become without their own mouthpiece, which relied on private ownership, freedom of speech and love of the country. The troublemakers in the country have occasional orders, and Vennamo used his orders as skillfully as possible.