Review: Mikko Räsäsen tulevaisuus

Mikko Räsänen’s future: Helsinki City Theatre will feature a man whom everyone looks down on It is easy for those belonging to the upper social classes to say that Finland is no longer a class society. The Future of Helsinki City Theatre’s Mikko Räsänen reflects on the class division of the present day and the possibility of human advancement.

Mikko Räsänen is the foreman at a street construction site where sewerage is actually being done, but where a temporary bicycle path needs to be built for show. This raises emotions among both citizens and employees. If the work is useless, will the person doing the work be appreciated either?

Partly as a result of these things, Räsänen ends up in a conflict at the construction site that threatens his workplace. His mind is already heavy due to the death of his wife, and at the same time, the pressure is caused by his son Aapo, who would like to continue on the path paved by his father and grandfather in manual labor. However, his father’s and once also his grandfather’s greatest wish was that his own son would have an easier life and better financial security.

Even the city’s infrastructure can no longer be built without simultaneous branding.

The future of Mikko Räsänen, the main stage of the Helsinki City Theatre, raises many themes. Are there still social classes in Finland? Is it possible for the next generation to rise from manual labor to white-collar labor, or will working class be inherited?

In addition to broader social issues, the topics include the language barriers and subcontracting chains of multinational construction sites and the potential problems caused by them. Today’s requirements for live streams and drone photography already extend to construction sites. Even the city’s infrastructure can no longer be built without simultaneous branding.

The roles of Mikko Räsänen (Martti Suosalo), the foreman of the street construction site, and Lasse Kosonen (Rauno Ahonen), who represents the creative class, are quite caricatured at first – a fair, sensible workman and a service designer riding an expensive hipster bike – but luckily new sides of them are revealed as the story progresses. Still, Räsänen’s feeling of inferiority remains puzzling. His son Aapo (Paavo Kääriäinen) describes his father as a man whom everyone looks down on. At the workplace, he is an engineer’s pawn, and outside the construction site, he represents a field where an employee is now automatically considered a guest worker. On a couple of occasions, it is implied that an honest worker is always deceived by the more successful. Still, life is accepted as it is. Although there may be stains on the overalls, at home the worker puts the helmet neatly on top of the boots.

The stage of the big stage adapts nicely to the construction site where the drones fly. The play is written by Mika Ripatti, who is a foreman in the construction of Stara’s urban engineering by his second profession. Heikki Kujanpää is responsible for the direction.