50 years old | Theater director Mikko Roiha dreams of a role in the Secret Secrets series and considers his role in Good Gentlemen the sin of his youth

Interview ends. Mikko Roiha gets up from the cafe table and pulls the scarf around his neck. As we go out, I ask if the artist professor would have liked to say anything more about himself.

A grin rises on the face.

“After all, everyone thinks I want to do just hard core drama. That is not the case. My dream is to play the musical subrette, to get on the Christmas calendar or to play the role of a janitor in the daily series, ”he assures.

Seppo to Taalasmaa?

“Never say never.”

Taalasmaa is a television recommendation Secret lives a well-known caretaker character from the series. The subretto role, in turn, refers to a side role, of which there may be several.

“The performers of these roles also got to the canteen side during the performance.”

Roiha is undeniably right in its analysis. He has profiled himself as a serious theater artist and has become known especially for his modern arrangements of classical plays.

Of these, he has been awarded the State Prize for Performing Arts and the Ten-Year Scholarship for Professor of Art.

For more than ten years, Roiha has worked at the Free Theater, whose works are always created in collaboration with other theaters. Most of the theater performances are rehearsed in Berlin, where they also get their premiere.

Roiha is a true multi-tasker: she both directs, sets, produces, illuminates and scripts most of her projects.

Roiha’s latest theater directing has premiered in early 2020 Maria Jotunin Golden calf. Due to interest rate restrictions, the premiere had to be shown in Berlin for only three spectators.

Does that still seem important?

“Of course,” Roiha replies.

“Theater is a kind of gaze. Otherwise, it will not happen. But even one viewer is enough. The best thing about Korona was that the species was not once measured in performance targets because it was impossible. The pandemic restored to theaters a healthy relationship with the audience, which will unfortunately soon be forgotten. ”

Official Roiha has no education as a theater maker. He graduated from the Department of Cinematography at the University of Art and Design in the late 1990s, but has not worked for a day as a director in the film world, which in Roiha’s mind turned out to be a “hard field” at the end of the millennium.

“There’s been going on with the wrong papers all the time,” he jokes.

For Roihalle, instead, the theater represented warmth, spaciousness, and freedom of opportunity. He says the biggest difference between theater and other art forms is its relationship to its own time.

“Making a theater is always a testimony that we all die in this hall on a world historical scale at the same time. This is, of course, a very romantic and philosophical view, but in theater it is about celebrating life. That sometimes we die, but we’re still alive. ”

However, Roiha is not interested in contemporary photography. In his own experience, the theater loses its true core when it begins to follow its time too quickly. Roiha says she leaves the commentary on the burning issues in the hands of the media.

“They’re doing it faster and better. I personally like to hit the wrong time, ”he says.

“Intentionally or unintentionally.”

Strongly the image of its time was Roiha’s first television role in a political satire series in the early 1990s Gentlemen. Roiha portrayed the homosexual waitress Timo in the series, who was nicknamed “Håkan” by the other central characters in the series.

Roihaa herself was called Finland’s first “entertainment gay” in the media. Good gentlemen at the time, Roiha was an active Seta in her twenties, and most of her interviews deal with sexuality.

Roiha himself describes Good gentlemen as his own “sin of youth” and says he wouldn’t really be able to talk about it.

Does it feel uncomfortable?

“From the past.”

Gentlemen is not very well aged. In today’s light, the gay character portrayed by Roiha appears as a blatantly stereotypical and caricaturing caricature of sexual minorities.

“Of course,” Roiha says and sighs.

“It goes without saying that what you did then is contradictory. On the one hand, my character gave role models, on the other hand, it was cliché. It both struck and made it possible. ”

There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the meaning of representations and the internal rules of fiction. The question has often been about how minorities should be represented in art. Who has the right to present who?

Roiha does not see the discussion as problematic.

“It’s not about not playing a bear if you’re not a bear yourself, or a prisoner if you’ve not been to prison yourself. The point is that we would give minority actors even a chance to be elected to the role. Others could abstain for a while. ”

Then he takes a short break.

“The danger in this debate is, of course, political correctness,” Roiha says.

“And art, of course, isn’t inherently politically correct.”

Read more: The capital is a good god and the Golden Calf is a new arrangement of five-star theater