Review: Taju
Cold shivers run down your skin when you watch actress Ursula Salo’s strong, emotional interpretation of the play Taju. I have seen her at the Helsinki City Theatre many times over the years, but would I dare to say now: Ursula Salo plays the role of her life as the daughter of the painter Tyko Sallinen’s Taju Birgitta Tiara .
The actor’s interpretation has everything you need: your own life experiences and strong professionalism. He plays the role as if with blood, completely exposed in his emotions and at the same time controlled.
But the play is not just any play either. Taju, written by Liisa Urpelainen and directed by Laura Jäntti , tells the story of the relationship between a talented, despotic and emotionally inconsiderate father and daughter. Jäntti’s grip on the fine text is tight, and especially the first half is breathtakingly intense. The second part, on the other hand, is slightly extended.
Tyko Sallinen (1879-1955) was born in Ostrobothnia into a feisty Laestadian family, and although he ran away from home at the age of 14 and graduated as one of Finland’s most important painters after years of wandering, he never got rid of his rigidity.
Taju was born as the second child of Sallinen and her visual arts student Helmi Vartiainen (1888-1920). Helmi is known for her numerous paintings of Sallinen’s Mirri, in which she stares as a dumbfounded, piggy-nosed woman. The paintings reveal a lot about Sallinen’s difficult relationship with women.
The family’s 2-year-old firstborn, Tyko Sallinen, had secretly taken the family’s 2-year-old firstborn from his wife to his sister’s home in Copenhagen, and she never saw his daughter again. Sallinen deprived his wife of a little sense after the divorce, even though the girl had been assigned to her mother in the divorce. Helmi Vartiainen died in obscure circumstances when Taju was 8 years old. She missed her mother for the rest of her life.
Taju (1912-1966) lived her childhood and growing into a woman with a difficult father. However, the child of artistic parents became a writer known as Irja Salla . He wrote his last book, Father and Me (1957), as a patient at the Nikkilä mental hospital. The book is an attempt to rewrite childhood and the relationship with his father. It was an attempt to remember the past as beautiful, an attempt to reach for the love she did not receive from her father.
Ursula Salo is Taju as a baby, a little girl, an adult woman who swallows men, and finally as a mentally deranged Nikkilä patient. Santeri Kinnunen is seen as a strong co-star in the role of the father, whose fierce performance chills the viewer.
Rauno Ahonen, Antti Lang and Iida Kuningas throw themselves wonderfully from one role to another, and Eero Ojanen , who sits behind the grand piano, has also composed the music for the play.
Laura Jäntti writes in the play’s script: “The memories of childhood moods and moments are endless. When you dig up one, ten already forgotten ones appear underneath it. Fortunately, the memory is merciful. Bright memories are easier to carry.”
I stayed thinking about those words for a long time in the evening. What do we remember from our own childhood?