Review: Meidän poika
Hopeless Child at the Helsinki City Theatre
It is downright astonishing how Pasi Lampela’s play Our Son can so effectively hold on to its entire two-hour duration, even though none of its twists and turns come as a surprise. To be honest, there aren’t even many twists and turns, but the events of the tragic story roll in like an inexorable chain of flashbacks from end to end. The play starts with a huge bang, so there’s no need to worry about how this will turn out.
Intensity can be called a trademark of Lampela’s plays I’ve seen, as well as desolation, but when a man writes about harsh subjects, it doesn’t help to start being too light-heartedly silly.
Our Son is a negative, zero-point growth story about Ville that avoids exaggeration and action gimmicks. He decides just at the point when life should open its arms after the matriculation examination with all its possibilities, that it is enough to take shit on his neck.
A boy who has been bullied at school, is a bit introverted, but quite ordinary and conscientious, he begins to feel that he is an unwanted person, and the least he wishes for his existence is himself. He has not been neglected in any way at home, on the contrary, he is the apple of the widowed mother’s eye, but contact difficulties with peers have led to being bullied, and bullying, of course, has correspondingly closed the boy’s mind even more.
And when hope ends, the solution, the farewell, must be of such a magnitude that it can be seen and heard. Ville learns the secrets of building a DIY bomb online, and receives instruction from the irresponsible bomb freak of the online community. Then one day, when the Mega shopping centre is having a market day, she packs a latch in her backpack and… We know the rest right from the opening scene of the play.
Disarming lead performance
Our Son is thus built on flashbacks that rewind Ville’s life film a few months back to the moments when the young man’s cup of suffering begins to spill over. The most important feature of Lampela’s text is that it does not succumb to blaming the people in Ville’s circle of life, nor does it try to explain or solve problems with the psychologization of the everyman’s class, in accordance with the spirit of the times.
The play is like a dispassionate, objective drama documentary about a young person’s despair and extreme solution. The emphasis is on the word drama, because even though Our Son is quite straightforward both in terms of text and direction, it gives the viewer room for interpretation and topics for longer reflection through its nuanced portraits.
Hannes Suominen is the perfect choice for the role of Ville. As thirty as he is, his appearance still has a schoolboy-like insecurity, naivety and, on the other hand, also the rebellion and unconditionality that often guides our actions at the age of high school.
The performance is disarming. Suominen is sometimes even frighteningly deep in Ville’s skin, but on the other hand, he can also be very endearing, reaching the viewer’s sympathy without courting them.
Good work is done on stage across the board. As a mother, Merja Larivaara is credibly confused and possessed by ambivalence: should you shout at your son or should you pet him? Mom does a little bit of both. Rauno Ahonen is a police investigator who supports the flashback structure and a kind of reconstructing narrator of the course of events. He is the balancing character of the story, who does not want to unleash chaos at any point, neither during Ville’s turmoil nor during the investigation after the explosion.
Ville’s schoolmates are played in a fresh way by Markus Riuttu and Elina Hietala. Both regulate their acting well on the scale between frenzy and introversion required by the roles. Kari Mattila loosely plays the only lightening element in the play, the mother’s date, who shows up to throw her lame wisdom into their living room to annoy Ville.
It is hopeful and relieving that the stages of the Helsinki City Theatre can accommodate a Finnish premiere like this in the midst of all the blue-and-white musical entertainment, where the most important thing is not the surface frosting, but a proper chewing feel.