Tuomo Rämö

Two important calls from recent history form the material for Two Phone Calls. The first took place in December 2020 when Russian politician and dissident Alexei Navalny pretended to be an agent of the security agency FSB and managed to fish out information from a ‘colleague’ about his poisoning. The second was made the following month by then President of the United States, Donald Trump. That call was received by a Georgian state authority, which was instructed to find more votes for the incumbent president.

Actors Outi Condit and Iida-Maria Lindstedt present an everyday object, a phone, as a tool for both distorting and revealing power. The ugly face of superpower politics is revealed in the words of the authorities themselves, through which the phone is made a weapon. Tragic elements are intertwined with comedy in the performance, arranged and directed by Tuomo Rämö. “The other thing, dead people. So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people,” Trump says over the phone.

Biography

Author/director Tuomo Rämö specializes in bringing non-dramatic materials to the stage. Among the members of the team, performers Outi Condit and Iida-Maria Lindstedt have also worked together in previous productions that utilized non-dramatic source materials. Condit and Rämö collaborated on the performance "Saatto - kulkue kuolevaisille" (Procession for Mortals) that traveled through Helsinki. Lindstedt and Rämö, on the other hand, created the performance "I niin kuin Idiootti" (I as an Idiot), which combined F.M. Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot" with Iida-Maria's experiences of sexual violence. The team also includes lighting and video designer Ville Hyvönen and sound designer Ilkka Tolonen.