Finland Looking Inward

Tampereen teatterikesä, Tampere Theatre Festival, Tampere, Finland, August 4–10, 2008.

The oldest and largest of the Nordic theatre festivals must necessarily have its Nordicness very much on its mind; and it’s true that the bulk of Finnish work in this year’s festival in Tampere either looked to the roots of national identity (there were several restagings of beloved classic novels) or at the current state of maintaining character in the face of the European juggernaut. But for Finland, reported in surveys to be the second-most contented country in the world, the gaze-turnedinward is also keenly conscious of the wider world and the Finns’ place in it. Much of the celebration in this, the festival’s fortieth year, looked beyond the fjords of home. A concentrated effort on the part of the organizers to include “off-off” pieces in the town square’s tent, which operated like a luxe cabaret one night and a mini-rock venue the next, and a visiting body of dramaturgs and festival organizers from far across Europe gave the post-performance discussions an air of cosmopolitan exchange. In many cases, visiting productions made bigger splashes than the homegrown ones— Finnish humor, in particular, did not translate easily. But in the mix, a certain character emerged: forthright, worried about the world, and yet refreshingly unconcerned with the changing theatrical fashion.

Tampere has the sleepy, scrubbed look of a Scandinavian suburb. It may proudly bear the title of “the Manchester of Finland” for its brick factories that loom all through downtown, but soot would not dare settle here. The factories are now shopping complexes; the canal dug for the linen industry winds docilely through town. Tampere reserves its messes for the stage. On stage, Finns can interrogate that famous contentment, and there they engage in political dramas that grapple straightforwardly with the largest two issues of our day—the ways we destroy each other and the way we continue to destroy the planet. Very little time is spent investigating formal theatrical questions, and the most self-consciously modern staging—a Swedish-language version (Finland is a two-language country) of Camus’s Caligula—did not venture far away from simple deconstruction. Four actors murmured and shouted by turns into microphones as they contemplated their own reflections in their mirrored box-set. As their boss deteriorated, so did they. Caligula, of course, never appeared: underlings reflect the man. As an American who had already had several discussions about national policy and its divorcement from the “real America,” this simple observation made for an uncomfortable two hours.

Tampere itself displays a misleading homogeneity—a visitor can go a week without seeing a non-white face. Even the counterculture operates in a massive, consistent block: the Metal moiety, with its safety pins and dyed-black hair, (politely) swarms the streets. When a production needs to signal its transgressiveness, like Seitsemän Veljestä (The Seven Brothers), it sends its characters out in eyeliner and lets loose with the fog machine and the pyrotechnics. Parts of this production, known for subverting a national classic, were indistinguishable from a death metal concert. As with most “rebellious” stage gestures that poach from the youth culture, these moments of artificial rage and headbanging were met with delighted, completely unthreatened applause. The Seven Brothers appeared in no fewer than three guises—a traditional staging, a solo version, and the “outrageous” one with the pounding soundtrack. Directors are flocking to Aleksis Kivi’s classic story of a boisterous family that retreats into the wilderness before it reaches rapprochement with society. The parallels to Finland’s European dilemma are obvious; these seven boys must first revel in their gaucherie, their rough-hewn saunas and their unapologetic maleness before they can choose to engage with the “civilized” society. The bargain, in which the boys lose a portion of their individuality, is one every member state in the EU finds itself making. The pleasures of this work came mainly from the acting ensemble, whose comfort in the repertory seems obvious. The stage pictures, composed by Mikko Roiha, returned too often to a pseudo-operatic mise-en-sc...