Review: Gagarinin tie
The End of the Workers’ Hero
Helsinki City Theatre: Studio Pasila: Gregory Burke: Gagarin’s Road. Finnish: Sami Parkkinen. Director: Maarit Ruikka. Set design: Kaisa Niva. Cast: Jouko Klemettilä, Mika Nuojua, Panu Vauhkonen, Matti Olavi Ranin.
In British literature (and in real life, too), the working class hero plays a significant role. He is usually a powerful, enlightened, upright, class-conscious person who takes the side of his comrades against the capitalists. In the great coal mining strikes of the 1970s and 1980s, there were many people like him.
In the Scottish play Gregory Burke’s The Way of Gagarin, the working-class hero is no longer enlightened or powerful. His class consciousness has become blurred, but he wants to do something, for example, give faceless, global capitalism some kind of face. So he has decided with a half-crazy psychopath to kidnap one of the international executives of his factory group.
Of course, things go wrong.
This working-class hero Gary (the excellent Panu Vauhkonen) declares himself a communist, but his thought structures are quite confused. However, the most important thing is that he is a good person.
Jouko Klemettilä’shandsomely portrayed nihilistic psychopathic Eddie is sharper than Gary, he speaks sovereignly about existentialism, globalization, being a man, but nothing means anything to him, except perhaps violence, and even that is only a little.
Gagarin’s path would be
been a sin in the 70’s
In the good old 70s, when political propaganda theatre was in its heyday, a work like Gagarin’s play The Road would have been slammed into the ground, and no one would have dared to perform it.
But now that communism has lost its status as the hope of the working class, and no one really knows what to do, the messing up anarchism of Gagarin’s path is understandable.
The bright-eyed working-class hero was still alive during the miners’ strikes, but global capitalism has deprived the hero of a tangible counterpart.
According to Gregory Burke, Gagarin’s road actually exists in the Scottish mining village of Lumphinnas. Communists have been voted for in the Scottish mining area for decades, and the only communist has even made it to the British Parliament.
But the Gagarin Road in the village of Lumphinnas ends in a dead end, it leads nowhere except to a bumpy football field.
Gagarin’s Road is horribly enough, a rather humorous play, although the laughter fades towards the end.
Acting
is effective
Maarit Ruikka’s direction is strict, she has brought out not only the political nature of the play, but also the perspective of being a man. According to Gregory Burke, however, there is no crisis of masculinity in Scotland. “We just get drunk and fight with each other. This has been going on for years.” A familiar way to face problems!
Gagarin’s Road is a story of four men. In addition to Vauhkonen and Klemettilä, Mika Nuojua and Matti Olavi Ranin do an excellent job. Nuojua is a blue-eyed, young student boy who is on a “temporary job” as a factory guard. Ranin is this kidnapped leader who is not what the kidnappers expected. Typically, he presents the most murderous analysis of globalization.
The Way of Gagarin is quite an effective work. It elegantly continues the line of Studio Pasila. Besides, it only lasts an intense hour and 40 minutes without a break. That’s a point in itself, you start to get bored of overly long plays.
Communism
ghost in Scotland
Gagarin’s path is that of the Scottish writer Gregory Burke, b. 1968, first play. The man says that he dropped out of university and did several important jobs for minimum wage while writing.
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Gagarin’s path has received several awards around the world, but according to Burke, the awards have not brought him any money. On the other hand, the performance rights of the play itself have not left the man completely poor.
Burke is currently writing another play and a screenplay.
Burke is Scottish, and he says that Scotland has the most class-conscious workers in the British Isles, who have voted for communists for decades. That is why there is a street called Gagarin’s Road in the village of Lumphinnans.
Gregory Burke was in Helsinki for the premiere of Gagarin’s Road, before the performance he said that the story came to his head as a dialogue. He did not even try to write a novel on the subject.
According to Burke, the work is definitely political, even if it is not in the old 70s way. The main themes of the work are power and violence. It is a tragic comedy about faceless globalisation.
“Globalisation is capitalism’s new, global way of profiting from labour. natural riches and knowledge.”
President Tarja Halonen was also at the press premiere of Gagarin’s Road, she sat next to the author, and told how she was a maid in England in her youth, so our president has also done important jobs for minimum wage.