Review: Tiimi

Emptiness can be fully described

With a precision dive into the lives of young urban adults, the small stage of the Helsinki City Theatre began its autumn. Pasi Lampela , born in 1969, is not a son of yesterday’s grouse as a playwright, and even now he presents us with a rather sharp picture. A living image literally, as the outlines of the characters only become more precise during the theatre evening. The author has also worked as a director, so you can believe that the performance will breathe in time with the text – as long as the initial overdrive has been overdone.

This work community, the story’s advertising agency team, has been touched by a tragic death at the same time as they should be cheering for a newly completed film. So it’s no wonder that the grief and boisterousness almost break the volume control button, so the audience that has just jumped into the game is confused for a while at first: there are quite a bunch of bimbo people on stage!

Well, the feet ten centimeters above the floorboards are actually swaying from start to finish, but there are enough backwaters that the plot takes shape, and the stage suddenly seems to be filled with a character who is not physically there. Jarmo, who has given up his life of his own volition, is the real central character of the story. A talented man, a family man, a diligent and restless toiler, seeking stimulation from the entertainment of the moment, burned out…

Each line always tells more and more about the team and its members, even the pauses speak. Jarmo was and gone, now the trio of Klasu, Saija and Kari remains. Frustrated surface gliders from all sides, living at the mercy of the media and marketing. If and when ideals ever existed, they seem to have evaporated from these “heroes of our time”. In fact, there is only hope for change among those outside the team, Jarmo’s widow Leila and the lively young office girl, Iiris.

Lampela’s modern language tastes right, v-punctuation, clichés, trendy jokes. And the interpreters of the story, skilled actors who would certainly improve the atmosphere of any cult restaurant, do not slip to the sidelines. Even crude innuendos do not take off by accident, they are blown off like feathers. And comedy, it doesn’t hurt, even though the urn of ashes next to it reminds me of mortality.

In this room theatre, Sara Paavolainen throws herself into wild ecstasy as a skilled and gorgeous yuppie woman, a neurotic male tennis player whose moment of taking off her mask is hurtful to watch. Both Juha Veijonen and boss Carl-Kristian Rundman show their comedic skills to their heart’s content, but when they get serious, they also move sovereignly on the limits of sensitivity. Ursula Salo takes on her role as a widow with astonishing psychological intensity and convinces the viewer that the phoenix rises from the ashes.

Merja Pietilä makes Iiris a slightly mysterious, but oh, so lively and sane young woman.