Two Phone Calls

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.