Review: Luonnon laki

Life is good in the end

A public hospital maintained with tax money. The roof is leaking, there are too few nurses and even the few are exhausted.

Helsinki City Theatre’s The Law of Nature is an intimate and personal story of survival and recovery. A story in which the brutal world of the hospital, smelling of human body secretions, can be felt on the skin. It is also a social and opinionated story of our time, the cuts in government spending and their effects on the individual.

“Fiercely serious and divinely humorous” is how the Helsinki City Theatre marketed its new play written by Kari Hotakainen and directed by Milko Lehto. And that’s what the performance really is. The play is a personal survival story of a serious car accident. It is also a story of friendship, death, the erosion of public health care and the generation gap. The law of nature bends flexibly in many ways.

The main character of the play, Rautala (Pertti Sveholm), is a middle-aged geothermal heating entrepreneur who evacuates taxes. His worldview doesn’t really fit all the tolerant, gay, green or mammoth people of the world. There is room for work in the world, but even for that, the tax bear takes the hell out of it far too much. It is not worth paying taxes because the Estonian competitor does it cheaper anyway. When Rautala lies in the hospital, bruised and unable to move, after a car accident, there is finally time to think about how to pay for the 1600 euros in the hospital. There is also time to meet, or at least try to meet, your own daughter, who looks at the world from a very different angle.

The play takes a strong stand. The picture of the times is that we cut, intensify, stop, reorganize, look at the budget critically… Is it a law of nature? We mainly have public health care – so we finance it with taxes. It is true that Finland’s tax rate is high compared to other OECD countries. It is also true that we spend relatively less of the tax money collected on health care than the other Nordic countries, and we are slightly below the OECD average. So how should our health care be financed? Where will the money come from when GDP falls? Helsinki City Theatre’s The Law of Nature is firmly rooted in the bloody everyday life of today’s cuts in Finland’s state finances.

Pertti Sveholm plays a brilliant lead role. Rautala is a middle-aged entrepreneur who finds himself in a hospital bed, who has been steaming forward in a hundred glasses until then, and for whom a sudden physical and mental stop causes pain and anguish. Sveholm builds his role to be believable with small gestures. Lying in a hospital bed is a middle-aged man in his most authentic form, in light blue hospital clothes, with a scabbed face. Sveholm gains human credibility in the character of Rautala through suffering and pain, but also through the surprising friendship that takes place at the hospital bedside. Sveholm also convinces in his role as a man who wonders about his own daughter’s life choices and finds himself at a completely surprising turning point.

Nurse Laura (Ursula Salo) is conscientious and hardworking. Laura takes care of and cares even though the roof is leaking, colleagues have been made redundant and resources have been reduced to a minimum. Salo manages to interpret the role of Laura very sensitively. A character for whom altruism – the unselfish care of one’s neighbour – is the most important part of humanity. But what happens when you can’t take it anymore? Salo plays it in a touching way. The editor character played by Matti Olavi Ranin strongly reminds me of the devil himself. Black-talking and snapping at everything. “When you write a billion on paper, it feels even bigger than in numbers. Still, it is only a small slice of the 54 billion budget.”

Janne Siltavuori has staged a hospital set on the Pengerkatu stage that supports the interpretation well and makes excellent use of the performance space and its columns. The small side scenes are excellently used for the scenes that take place outside the hospital room. Mika Ijäs has done the great lighting design for the performance. From the emergency lights of an ambulance, to flashlights wiping the stands and illuminating the face of death.

The stage on Pengerkatu is a challenging space with its columns and corridors. When using sound effects or singing and speech at the same time, hearing is challenging. At the premiere, there were still problems with the actors’ speech. Hopefully, the working group will succeed in improving the reception in the performance space as the performances continue. A little dramaturgical tightening, a quarter of an hour away from the now 2 hours and 40 minutes play, would have been good for the play.

As a whole, the City Theatre’s The Law of Nature is a compelling performance. It speaks to both an individual’s intimate survival story and as a topical, social discourse. In the end, there is a new life, a new friendship, a new relationship with oneself, a daughter and a grandchild.

It is a law of nature.

Kari Hotakainen

The law of nature

Premiere 27.1.2016 Pengerkatu Stage

Cast: Pertti Sveholm, Iikka Forss, Sari Haapamäki, Sanna-June Hyde, Matti Leino, Matti Olavi Ranin, Leena Rapola, Matti Rasila, Ursula Salo, Marjut Toivanen Dramatization: Sami Keski-Vähälä

Director: Milko Lehto

Set design: Janne Siltavuori

Costumes Riitta: Röpelinen

Lighting design: Mika Ijäs

Sound design: Maura Korhonen

Camouflage and hairstyles: Tuula Kuittinen