Review: Meidän poika

I’d rather be a ruler in hell than a servant in heaven

Pasi Lampela’s new play examines bullying at school and how a bullied boy ends up committing extreme acts.

An ordinary son of an ordinary mother. Such is the case of Ville (Hannes Suominen), a high school student in Pasi Lampela’s new play, who lives alone with his mother (Merja Larivaara) and whose life has no friends.

Instead, you can hear Stalin’s biography, Hitler’s Mein Kampf and, no doubt, a hefty stack of Nietzsche as well. Ville personifies a classic school-bullied reclusive, who hatches revenge on his bullies by seeking impetus for his ideas from the world-famous übermenchi delusions.

The model of the external events of the drama is taken from the bomb attack on the Myyrmanni shopping centre and the subsequent school killings. Ville’s inner voice follows the well-known revenge fantasies of school shooters, and the external setting of the play is reminiscent of many of Lampela’s earlier texts.

It is also about some kind of structural emptiness of the middle-class lifestyle and the collapse of the façade. This is Pasi Lampela’s characteristic theme, which he has successfully studied throughout his dramatic production. Our Son consistently, beautifully and sadly complements Lampela’s project as a complement to the plays Westend and Geneva and why not the Abyss. Still, it is a completely independent work, an art creation at the absolute peak of the theatre autumn.

The novelty of Our Son’s structure is the chronologically breaking narrator, the police officer investigating Ville’s case (Rauno Ahonen). He ponders the reasons why a bullied boy ends up doing extreme acts. Why does a nice guy who has done well in school suddenly walks into a shopping center crowded with crazy shopping days with a school backpack full of explosives? The wise policeman cannot come up with a definitive answer, but sees in Ville a piece of his own wandering youth.

One succeeded in squeezing out the anger of the young man inside him, while the other generated it into a devastating terrorist attack.
Pasi Lampela is too smart a writer to give school bullying alone as an explanation for Ville’s extreme actions. The reasons for the events are partly left open, some of them are explained by a classic choice: whether I would rather be a ruler in hell than a humble servant in heaven.

Our son’s high school student chooses the former, with well-known consequences.