Review: Mikko Räsäsen tulevaisuus

Father, Son and Humanity

On the big stage of the Helsinki City Theatre, Mikko Räsänen’s play The Future delves into the world of three generations of men and the class differences in society, as well as the soil of Helsinki at a sewer construction site.

Mikko Räsänen is a 55-year-old street construction site foreman and a second-generation city construction worker. The play moves in two time planes; At times, we are on stage in the 1980s, when Mikko’s father Heikki worked at the city’s construction sites and hoped to be able to offer his son Mikko the opportunity to study and thus a better life. However, Mikko’s studies were interrupted by his father’s death, and Mikko went to work for the city as a labourer, following in his father’s footsteps.

Mikko’s son Aapo has just turned 18. Despite his tight financial situation, Mikko has saved money for Aapo’s prep courses, hoping for the same as his own father; better education and life for the boy.

Great emotions rise to the surface; love, friendship, sadness, co-workers, anger, bitterness, disappointment and frustration.

The technology of the big stage comes into its own in the play’s set design and in the light and sound landscape. The construction site with its sewer pipes created on the stage is genuinely realistic. Mika Ripatti’s text, Heikki Kujanpää’s direction, Antti Mattila’s set design, Petteri Heiskanen’s lighting design and Eero Niemi’s sound design effectively draw the viewer into both the construction site area and the sewer well – the auditorium and stage fade into the background, and the viewer feels like a fly on the ceiling following the work on the site and the words of the workers.

The casting hits the spot. The legendary Martti Suosalo, who has shown his charisma and adaptability on several occasions, is an even more genuine character as the understated, calm workman in the title role of Mikko Räsänen, in his dirty overalls as if straight from a construction site.

Among construction workers, however, native Finns are already rarer than workers with an immigrant background, who in the play are interpreted by Martti Manninen as Aivar Tamm, who is of Estonian origin, and Maksim Pavlenko, who graduated from the St. Petersburg State Academy of Theatre Arts in 2008, as Pavel Tyurin, who is of Russian origin. The verbal and bickering between Aivar and Pavel throws out all too topical lines about “Putin’s tanks”, among other things.

In particular, Rauno Ahonen’s service designer Lasse Kosonen and Jari Pehkonen’s engineer and unit director Kimmo Niemi are, down to their mannerisms, almost disgustingly genuine portraits as selfish opportunists. Lasse Kosonen, a service designer who identifies himself with the upper class, saves Mikko Räsänen, a representative of the working class, from almost certain death only because “the death of a worker would not look good on a service designer’s CV”. However, Kosonen’s need and desire to save himself after a site explosion threw him and Räsänen stuck in the sewer.

At first glance, the street construction site built on the stage with its concrete pipes does not seem inviting, but the whole with its lights, smoke, sounds and music works well. In addition to his work as a writer, the play’s scriptwriter Mika Ripatti is a professional in water supply and street construction, working as a foreman in the construction of Stara’s urban engineering, which explains the feeling of authenticity of the events and backgrounds of the play.

Mikko Räsänen’s Future is a performance that provokes thoughts and speaks to people. The performance is also likely to be the first to bring real drones to the stage of the City Theatre.