Review: Gagarinin tie

At a global economic impasse

Gagarin’s Road is a closed stretch of street in a small village in the coal mining district of Scotland. The region’s constituency is the only one from which a Communist representative has ever been elected to the British Parliament. Scottish playwright Gregory Burke, a member of the 30+ generation, named his debut play, which has become a worldwide success, after a street.

The play is about both the impasse in the lives of four men and the impasse of social influence in a world where the socialist counterforce has been cleared to make way for global market forces. Burke’s vision of the individual’s ability to influence in today’s society is quite desolate, but the play is still a comedy.

Gagarin’s path takes place in a masculine world where there is hardly any other gender. Burke builds his play in a Mamet-like manner from the battles between powers, plenty of fast-paced speech, and characters who act as dynamos for each other. The comedy of the play is based on the typical rhythm of an action movie, where cruelty and despair are dismissed with sharp quips.

Four men
in the warehouse

Jouko Klemettilä plays Eddie, a 32-year-old warehouse worker who has a shady gig going on. The scene of the incident is a large company’s warehouse with loading docks. Eddie is accompanied by Tom, a 22-year-old security guard who has an academic degree and still hopes to move forward in life. Mika Nuojua also does a great job as the jelly-like Tom of uncertainty, who ends up in completely the wrong company.

Panu Vauhkonen’s Gary, on the other hand, remains a bit monotonous as a role. Vauhkonen has perhaps had to focus on working on aggressive power figures for too long, and now he doesn’t seem to have quite enough means to express the cocktail from which Burke has built Gary’s character: political idealism, nostalgic admiration for old heroic deeds, and a desperate life situation.

As the fourth man in Matti Olavi Rani’s play, he is also rather flat in his one-liners at the beginning, but as the end approaches, Frank’s cold, dry sarcasm that emerges is an even more chilling analysis of the social situation than the desperate stunt that triggers Eddie and Gary.

The information superhighway
and inflation

Although Burke’s characters are reminiscent of Mamet, the former differ from the latter in one particular way. Burke puts his person in the middle of the metal walls of the storage room to discuss e.g. Sartre’s existentialism, Jean Genet, the king of thieves, the local history of communism and the heroes of the workers.

With this, Burke really produces something essential and original about the world of the late 20th century and its people; An incredible amount of information is available to anyone, but at the same time, the importance of information has shrunk to nothing. Education is no longer the key to a better world. And at least knowledge cannot have the slightest effect on preventing violence.
Maarit Ruikka has directed Gagarin’s Road to Studio Pasila at the Helsinki City Theatre into a smooth, well-flowing drama. Teppo Saarinen’s lighting design changes the lighting situation on stage according to the turning points of the play, which makes the lights a visible part of the performance, but creates a slightly clumsy impression when they are evenly paced.

As a sound designer, Ari-Pekka Saarikko has not set out too much to spice up the talkative play, which seems like a good solution. The muffled, low dum-dum sounds as the atmosphere tenses and the occasional echo of the space make the situations very sturdy.