Theatre, History, and National Identities (review)

Reviews237 are shown in visual media ofthe periods and places under consideration. A comparison in this regard maybe made with Kipling's Enter the King, which has fifty illustrations interspersed in the text. Clifford Davidson Western Michigan University Helka Mäniken, S. E. Wilmer, and W. B. Worthen, eds. Theatre, History, andNationalIdentities. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2001. Pp. 331. $36.00 paperback. This is a superb collection ofeleven essays which represents the work of faculty and graduate students in a series of seminars on theater and nationalism convened by Pirkko Koski at the International Centre for Advanced Theatre Studies at the UniversityofHelsinki every summer between the years 1995 and 2000. The essays are grouped into three sections—"Creating Theater," "Creating the Nation"; "Interrogating National Discourse"; "Borders of National Identity"— in a book that promotes an investigation of how national identities have been constructed and revised in the theater, primarily in Finnish theater, vis-à-vis imperialism and multiculturalism. Essays by Steve Wilmer, Hanna Suutela, and Freddie Rokem in the first section discuss how Finnish, Irish, and Israeli theater initially fostered a sense of national character, identity, and heritage by recourse to the epic side of their respective folk traditions as manifested especially in the Kalevada (Finland), the 72»'« (Ireland), and the Bible (Israel). Wilmer traces the faded links between Finnish and Irish cultural nationalism back to German intellectuals (e.g., Friedrich Klopstock, Johann Gottfried von Herder) who restored a sense of pride in their own linguistic and cultural past by advancing a belief in the importance of the cultural traditions of the common folk and by encouraging the creation of German works of art which would compete with (instead of imitating) the values of the supposedly superior foreign cultural imports, especially from France and England. Wilmer astutely analyzes the complex relationships that Finnish and Irish theaters had with the imperial Russian and British governments in a briefbut clear manner, highlighting the politics and particularities of cultural nationalism during the process of recovering and revamping old myths and folklore in both countries. He then gives a lucid and more detailed account ofthe ways in which national 238Comparative Drama theaters, as producers of nationalist plays, contributed to awakening Finnish and Irish audiences to the possibilities of new constructions of identity and nationhood even though theywere not always in line with concurrent audience notions of national identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is to nineteenth-century Fennomania that Suutela's essayturns the attention ofits readers. This Finnish upper-class nationalist movement played a significant role in the formation ofthe first Finnish-speaking professional company, the Finnish Theater ofdirector Kaarlo Bergbom. The agenda ofthe Fennomans for popular education and class conversion initiated a second phase in the history ofthe Finnish Theater which eventually became the National Theater of Finland. Thanks to its new board of directors and especially to the board's secretary , Antti Almberg-Jalava, who was close to the Peasant Estate, the second phasewaspresentedasa newstepin the developmentofthesame companyrather than as the launching of a new company which shared some of the initial programmatic goals oftheolderone.This ingenious and detailed account traces the developmentofthe FinnishTheateralong thetrajectoryofFennomania from the time Fennomania was a divided class movement to the time it became a unified nationalist movement. The ideal of Fennomania, shared by Senator Johan Vilhelm Snellman and the directors ofthe Finnish Theater, was Hegel's concept of the state as a moral community oflike-minded citizens forming an autonomous , cultural, social, and political entity which is self-reflective and asserts its spirit ("Geist"). Consequently, the board ofdirectors was expected to respond to the theatergoers'opinions on the moralityofstage realism and on the loyalty of the Finnish people to the czar.The companybegan giving free folk performances for all social classes in 1881, and itbecame a forum for public discussion bymeans ofthe kind of realism that had been introduced by Henrik Ibsen. A different kind of public discussion was introduced by the Habima Theatre (initially called the "Biblical Studio" and later the "Habima Collective") and the Itim Ensemble, two of several theater companies in Israel that produced plays based on stories from the Hebrew Bible, which served as a source of inspiration because ofthe...