Review: COMEBACK – räpätessä roiskuu

Comeback – splashes on the Arena stage when rapping

Rap star Biiffi, who has already ended his career with a spectacular farewell gig, has announced to his great surprise that he will return to the stage and is preparing for his sold-out comeback concert at the Olympic Stadium.

These stations will be the starting point for the farce novelty “Comeback – rapping splashes”, which is set in the Finnish entertainment world of the Helsinki City Theatre. However, Biiffi (Peter Kanerva) hastens to clarify that this is not a return, but actually a resurrection, because as the son of the rap god, he must be “born again”.

Under siege by the horde of fans on duty under the balcony of a luxury hotel, Biiffi’s manager (Minna Koskela) has an impossible task to try to keep the façade up and the rapper in concert condition. And I don’t think it will succeed when a sensitive civilian self peeks out from behind the rap star’s tough role – Pasi, who grew up in the care of Nakkila’s grandmother – and the pressure in all senses of the word becomes too high.

Hip-hop is known as the playground of “toxic masculinity”, but masculinity remains nothing but toxicity in this farce, because returning in front of tens of thousands of enthusiastic fans makes the artist’s stomach dangerously loose. So there will be cheap poop humor and kicker jokes, even if the story doesn’t rest entirely on them.

Written by its director Sakari Hokkanen and dramatised by Sanna Niemeläinen, Comeback is a classic farce in form: the events unfold in real time, in a single room with doors that come and go, and identities also tend to blend a little.

With the exception of Eija Vilpanen, who plays the rapper’s grandmother, Comeback is staffed by actors who have rarely or never been seen before at the Helsinki City Theatre.

Sauli Suonpää, who plays Biiffi’s colleague rapper Mela, has been able to show his elasticity suitable for the genre on this same Arena stage earlier in the farce “The Hired Killer’s Nightmare”, and once again gets a slap in the face from the doors in a spectacular way. A couple of Suonpää’s gigs seem to defy gravity.

Peter Kanerva, who has worked on Swedish-speaking stages, works up a sweat and performs a funny lead role as the tense Biiffi. The cheerful Janna Räsänen is excellent as an enthusiastic piccolo who can’t resist the temptation to snap secret photos in gossip magazines about embarrassing situations that she gets to witness. Comedian Minna Koskela, known from the TV series “Kumman kaa”, delights as the rapper’s manager Taina Kovanen.

The luxury suite, set by Katariina Kirjavainen, has been lit by Kari Leppälä, and the sound design is by Joonas Outakoski. who has also written the songs heard in the farce (such as “Bodattu mut yksin” and “Alla chicksit petä – except mutsi”) to Hokkanen’s lyrics.

The ride offered by the comeback is smooth in terms of both movement and verbal skills. And when the driving force is the modern day of the entertainment world, there has been no attempt to obscure the similarities, but on the contrary, to emphasize them. Or what do the artist names Maila Koivusieni, Kutri-Helinä or Santeri Edelweiss – or the rap duo OMG that acts as a warm-up act – seem to be on Biiffi’s comeback gig?

The lightly joyful two-hour film offers a quick, sharp carving about the surface gliding of popular culture and other contemporary phenomena. However, under the surface, there is a slightly sad reflection of a time when everything private and intimate has disappeared because we decided to make everything universally shareable. That’s why only the façade is important to Biiffi and its partners, not what is behind it. I wonder what about the rest of us?

Premiere on the Arena stage of the Helsinki City Theatre on 30.1.2019.