Review: Meidän poika

One of Ville’s many?

There is nothing to indicate that the social trends that produce such actions and phenomena are decreasing or disappearing. On the contrary, playwright and director Pasi Lampela has said.

It is about the play Our Son , written and directed by Lampela, which premiered at the Helsinki City Theatre last week.

The play begins and ends with an explosion in a shopping centre. The bomb was made by Ville, a bullied, suffering schoolboy.

Pasi Lampela is known to be a writer who lives in time. In this fifteenth play, too, he finds his subject in a reality that everyone knows exists, but to which most of us close our eyes and ears. With this search, the topics can be found on the dark side of society, in the phenomena that it pushes into hiding.

The scariest – and at the same time in a way the most dubious – is the topicality of Our Son . School shootings. An atrocity in Norway. They are the consequences of the social trends that Lampela is referring to.

Those tragic events are in my memory. You can’t ignore them when you deal with what you see on stage in front of you.

There are savages

There are several wilds. The Ville in the play is one of many. Many of them are like Ville in the play, living alone with his mother, without real friends. Many of them are similarly outsiders, mistreated and disadvantaged. For many of them, the internet is the only way to find a friend. In the play, Ville was paired with a bomb buddy, the last friend for the abused one, who becomes a help and guide on the play’s Ville’s path to extremes.

The play is a story about an anxious boy who feels that he has been left so deprived and mistreated that he feels that a desperate atrocity is the only final option. With it, he feels that he is redeeming the right to exist for himself.

The life of the bullied boy unfolds in all its horror in the play. The blindness of our fellow human beings to see and understand, including our own mother, is also revealed. It also reveals the brutality of our fellow human beings, their inability to help.

It is especially thought-provoking that the person who understands and even tries to help a small person in need is a police officer. Again, we get one topic to ask: is this really where our society has gone? Is an authority really a neighbor? A reference to the discussion about the responsibility for education – parents or the school – is in order.

Meant for chance

The play hits and it hurts. Lampela wants to hurt with his text, to make us think about what we could do to prevent a play like this from telling reality. It so happens that someone may think that real-life events are so close and recent that it would not be appropriate to write about something like this.

Pasi Lampela has said that he thought about this when he started writing about the subject back in the day – that is, years ago. Unfortunately, he is probably right to justify addressing the topic by saying that violent events will continue. It is a phenomenon that is becoming part of our everyday lives.

If it is considered that a play can be said to have a function, then this play has one.

Wake up there on the living room couch or from the work you brought home. If only we bothered to ask a little about the well-being and well-being of the offspring. If you do this in time, you don’t have to be such a non-human to a child or a young person.