JUHA SILTANEN

Texts as a challenge to theatre-makers

 

The forty-something Juha Siltanen is among the dramaturges produced by the Theatre Academy since the late 1970s in the form of all-rounders skilled in the use of a number of tools. Most of them are now significant dramatists who, in addition to writing, are more broadly influential in the fields of the arts and the media.

 

When the high-foreheaded Siltanen, who has a reputation as an intellectual and is known primarily for his depictions of the contemporary middle classes, recently listed, for a grant application, the achievements of his twenty-year career, the result was ten sheets of densely typed text: 33 stage plays, a dozen radio plays, 10 television plays, of which one was a television opera libretto, four film scripts, 11 dramatisations and adaptations from Shakespeare to Calvino, 40 translations of drama and prose, 11 ‘others’, from a Lennon evening to a radiophonic Faust composed together with Magnus Lindberg and realised in the experimental studio of the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, 14 directions of radio and stage plays and music and, ‘in addition’, a page-worth of undifferentiated essays, columns, teaching, positions of trust, commentary, regular live radio programmes....

The last page listed various grants and prizes, among them the Prix Italia for that radiophonic Faust. Another special Prix Italia was awarded for his radio play Kristallivuori (‘The crystal mountain’).

Juha Siltanen shouldn’t have become a theatre person at all. The youth who was aiming for a career in musicology, however, decided it would be wise not to put all his eggs in one basket in his university entrance exams. At the Theatre Academy, too, he found himself on the dramaturgy course because his ‘unsociability made him unfit’ to be a director. Siltanen has subsequently realised his director’s calling with the Radio Theatre and, particularly in the late 1990s, with the Pori-based Rakastajat (‘Lovers’) theatre group, where he has directed both his own works and the work of others.

The passion of a pianist and musicologist has also accompanied Siltanen’s theatrical work. Jovial friendship with the important international Finnish musicians of his own generation has resulted in both independent and joint works. In addition to Lindberg, Jouni Kaipainen, composer of the television opera Konstanzin ihme (‘The miracle of Konstanz’), the conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen and Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Juhani Liimatainen, the sound virtuoso of the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation’s experimental studio, have created musical works together with the dramatist. Siltanen has visited Suvisoitto, the Porvoo summer festival started by the Avanti! orchestra, which was started by the young conductors, a number of times as a text-maker and director. Suuri tapaus (‘A great event’), a two-handed cabaret to music by Arnold Schönberg and Kurt Weill, was heard in Porvoo last summer, and the monologue But it is all changed, based on the life and writings of Igor Stravinsky, in 1992.

Siltanen accepted the theatre as his destiny largely because, like music, it, too, takes place in time. He considers radio an excellent tool. An auditory medium offers broader opportunities for the creation of imaginary images and rhythms than the stage. ‘The theme or plot itself is not decisive. The whole must resonate at some nervous level, otherwise it has no meaning,’ says Siltanen, who confesses that he is a romantic in terms of his attitude to his art.

‘Without strong emotion in regard to one’s material, it is useless to begin work, but craft skills mean close intellectual control,’ says the writer. For a diverse and multi-styled artist, he himself reads, in his own opinion, surprisingly little and slowly. But his relationship with his material is all the more impassioned for that. For example, Siltanen immersed himself in the theme of the fatherless boy for four years.

Three fatherless king’s sons made their appearance as he was working on the libretto of the opera Konstanzin ihme, from the world of the French religious worlds, Catherine de’ Medici and the dawn of the Enlightenment. They resulted in an extravagantly Shakespearean radio novel, Kuninkaan pojat (‘The king’s sons’), consisting of four plays, a disrespectful fresco of 16th-century Europe, which gave birth to our belief in the capacity of logical thought to make the world more and more perfect.

‘I stare the whole time. My main job is to think, to see, like Pinter, in small things something that reveals the larger ones,’ says Siltanen, for whom Pinter and cinema, as well as Pier Paolo Pasolini, are important both for their films and their texts, but also for their artistic attitudes: ‘Pasolini was strongly subjective, but it was precisely through that subjectivity that he engaged in dialogue with society.’

Considered intellectual, even difficult, Siltanen’s plays do not always follow the traditional line of scenes or drama. On the surface, urban, generally middle-class people who cultivate linguistic witticisms often act past one another. Beneath the text, however, there is a moral, even a political, base. People’s alienation, loneliness and incapacity to communicate in a world overflowing with communications tools, in which everyone longs for the harmony of people like them but in which no one appears to accept responsibility.

Siltanen’s characters are accused of talking past each other. ‘I think my people listen and react on that basis. Although they sometimes talk past each other, then nevertheless reveal the most important thing, their intentions. Speech, whether it is deliberate or accidental, is often merely superficial – most important are tensions and depth. It is important to show the process of thinking and feeling – what a person is thinking and feeling, so that he says what he does.’

Siltanen’s musical background is apparent in his plays, either inbuilt or physically audible. Sometimes his plays consist of a theme and variations through which, by changing perspective, he bores deeper into the world he creates.

In the trilingual Akvarium Akvaario Aquarium, written with Thomas Wulff, travellers on the deck of a listing ship return again and again, like an electronic game, to their starting point as the ‘players’ engage in philosophical conversation and order an external observer: ‘Save Madeleine – Try again!’

In Lulu Bach, written and directed for the Pori Rakastajat group, a set of memory-variations in which a man and woman unexpectedly meet, Siltanen has adapted the Rachmaninov variations, sostenuto, furioso.... Kohtaaminen älykkään naisen kanssa (‘A meeting with an intelligent woman’), written for Helsinki City Theatre, is a tightly orchestrated texture of conversation for four couples in which timing is essential. Seen from the surface, the self-confident torrent of talk reveals, like an autopsy, the inner worlds of the characters – shocking, amusing, true. The entirety finally develops into a full-blown farce. ‘Of all the genres of theatre, farce is the most like absolute music,’ says the writer himself. The theme of the play is, ‘Women want a whole life. Men want a perfect one.’ From the point of view of expectations and their realisation, the theme of the couples, in different situations, is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s My Funny Valentine. Its words convey a great tenderness, burned to ashes, even though a luxuriantly artistic middle-aged woman character opens the show jauntily with the Vesivehmas jenkka, a folk dance.

As political and ‘theological’ a writer as Juha Siltanen considers himself to be, his social message is indirect. The characters of Foxtrot, who represent different generations, are media professionals, journalists, psychiatrists, politicians, whose control patients are the verbal virtuosi of the mental hospitals. In a Chekhovian manner, they are incapable of leaving their islands in relation to one another or to the important events of history which penetrate them. It is also a question of the cities formed by people, cold and dark.

The city in A niin kuin Amsterdam (‘A as in Amsterdam’) is, concretely, Pori, the home of the Rakastajat group, which is generally thought of as dismal. But it could equally well be any European town, where there are people who lack perspective, who are spiritually and physically poor but who long for happiness. The starting point is a situation like that in Kieslowski’s A Small Film About Love: three people who are acquainted only by watching one another through the window meet in the centre of town in a strange, deserted house where the mysterious figures of the cultivatedly halfwitted Mrs Falk and the abandonedly dancing A open up for the trio an opportunity for change. The view of madness as sometimes a refreshing power, sometimes a destructive counterforce to the modern world is indeed one of Siltanen’s leading themes.

Sometimes the use of many different elements simultaneously sets a hard task for the traditional machinery of theatre. One of Siltanen’s most important plays, Strip-tease eli Tanskan kuninkaan kuolema (‘Strip-tease or the death of the king of Denmark’), as presented at the Tampere Workers’ Theatre, included dance-theatre, and parts for a chamber orchestra, choir and film. The text, which is set in the business world and deals with the pressures that drive one of the characters to suicide, was recognised as excellent, although not everyone found their way to the themes recorded by the writer in the programme: ‘The struggle for power of the main characters is not merely jostling within a single company – it is the struggle between fear and daring, memory and hope, power and self-sacrifice, Judas and Spartacus, life and death.’

Siltanen flees definitions, for he does not wish to step onto his own footsteps. He shifts from one time, theme and style to another. From time to time he likes to work without words. Together with the dancer and choreographer Jorma Uotinen, he has made a musical script, Piaf Piaf, which was a positive surprise to its audiences, the ballet Lasisonaatti (‘The glass sonata’), to music by Sibelius, also with Uotinen, the through-sung, danced and played Tiikerin varjo (‘The shadow of the tiger’), based on Kipling’s The Jungle Book, for the rock theatre Motelli Skronkle, a slapstick comedy, Samaan aikaan toisaalla (‘Meanwhile, elsewhere’), in the style of the Marx brothers, set in a museum, and many other texts which challenge the borders of stylistic and performance traditions.

‘I have the professional dream to make texts a challenge to the makers, too, so that they do not return from the process of rehearsal and performance as the same people.’

Hilkka Eklund

Juha Siltanen

 

More than 30 plays for stage, television and radio. Dramatisations and adaptations, translations of plays (including works by Pinter, Mamet, Williams, various cross-disciplinary works in collaboration with composers, artists and choreographers).

His stage plays include Akvarium Akvaario Aquarium (1986), Tiikerin varjo (‘The shadow of the tiger’, 1987), Foxtrot eli valkoiset varjot (‘Foxtrot or the white shadows’, 1990, translated into English and Swedish), Strip-tease, eli Tanskan kuninkaan kuolema (‘Strip-tease, or the death of the king of Denmark’, 1991), Kohtaaminen älykkään naisen kanssa (‘Meeting with an intelligent woman’, 1995), Taivaallinen tanssija (‘Heavenly dancer’, 1996), A niin kuin Amsterdam (‘A as in Amsterdam’, 1997, translated into French), Tuuli se puhaltaa (‘The wind it blows’, 1999). His radio plays include Hehkulasi (‘The incandescent lamp’, 1983), Aamu (‘Morning’, 1986), Kristallivuori (‘The crystal mountain’, 1987), Madeira (1989), Noli me tangere (1991-2), Kuninkaan pojat (‘The king’s sons’, 1991-5).