Soila Lehtonen

Relative freedom

From groups to companies: notes on the theatre outside institutions

 

In Finland ‘a theatre’ has most often been a synonym for ‘a company’; the company is where the building is, or, the building is the permanent home for a company. In fact, in the Finnish language there is no viable equivalent for the word ‘company’. Some 30 years ago ‘a theatre’, then referred to as ‘an institution’, became the opposite to a ‘free theatre group’ when a new category of theatre emerged.

Many of those groups still exist, and new ones have been born, but the word ‘free’ seems to have disappeared; absolute freedom has been exchanged for social security in the form of public subsidies. Most groups have also identified themselves with a building: they have a permanent address. More than ‘groups’, they are now ‘companies’.

At the turn of the millennium, Finland appears to have 54 professional theatre companies which receive support from society, i.e. the tax-payer, and 15 of them are what is known as theatre groups. These are companies that are not directly governed by the municipal authorities but which nevertheless receive public subsidies defined by the 1993 cultural funding act; the municipalities and central government fund our enjoyment of professional theatre, on average, to the tune of more than 70 per cent.

Finnish theatre history is short but, in fact, not too grim, financially at least. In the following, briefly, some background about the ‘free theatre groups’ (excluding dance companies and children's theatre). Since the 1960s, the Finnish republic has given them a fair degree of relative freedom, in effect a great deal: money with no artistic obligations. Who cares about absolute freedom if people don't get paid for their work?

After it achieved independence in 1918, Finland became an officially bilingual country; it organised itself in such a way that most towns developed, with time, a permanent theatre (both building and company), supported by government funds – there were hardly any commercial professional theatres. The role of the theatre (a little like that of the library) was seen as an educational institution presenting the products of the (western) dramatic arts diversely.

The idyll continued: new, handsome and (too) large theatre buildings were constructed. Then the 1960s arrived, bringing with them societal polarisation, (party) politics and the student movement. International politics and the student movement reached even Finland; on a national level, there was a mass movement from the country to the cities, particularly the capital. The young people of the baby-boom generation studied, radicalised and internationalised. In the 1960s, the values of previous generations were questioned perhaps more extensively than ever before. The peacefully cultivated life of the theatre was now shaken by the fact that young theatrical folk noticed that theatres were ‘institutions’ living the harmonious and boring artificial life of a past world.

Young theatricals began to found ‘free theatre groups’. ‘Free’ meant democratic decisions as to what theatre to make and how to make it; ‘theatre group’ meant a freely self-selecting group living outside the institutions. ‘Group’ also meant that it toured the country, and abroad when the opportunity arose, taking new theatre particularly to places where it did not exist.

The new free theatre groups were idealistic and often also ideological. Leftism was, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a strong trend; it was, indeed, difficult for opponents to express their criticism of its best cultural achievements.

Brecht was a byword of the 1960s, as were new, specific, commissioned texts. Theatre groups purposefully collaborated on cultural projects with the workers’ movement, which was living through a social boom in those years. Finnish history, too, was being rewritten in the theatre productions of the time: the parents of the young theatre people born in the 1940s had fought for Finland’s freedom in the Second World War, but the young people wanted to see history from a new perspective. Children were paid particular attention: the theatre groups understood the possibilities of educational work – and the gap in the market, new audiences who were ready to grasp the alternatives offered to the dusty princess stories of the institutional theatres.

Of Finland’s five million inhabitants, about a million live in and around the capital, and theatrical life, too, is fairly centralised. In what follows I shall describe what I feel to be the most important groups of the past decades.

During the 1960s, Helsinki saw the birth of a number of free groups, of which the first was Ryhmäteatteri (or ‘Group Theatre’, a name that certainly seems unimaginative), in 1967. It has performed permanently since 1982 in a former cinema in the Kallio district, which has traditionally been an area favoured by workers and, more recently, by students. Ryhmäteatteri is based on a patrons’ association, and since the 1970s it has also performed in a number of summers in a summer theatre, the Bastion of Good Conscience, located on the fortified islands of Suomenlinna in Helsinki harbour. It was there, for example, that it presented the astonishingly well-realised six-hour spectacular Lord of the Rings in 1988 and 1989.

Ryhmäteatteri has always worked, in particular, with new Finnish texts and European classics. Contemporaneity and the avant-garde have interested it, and it has not shunned racy farces, either. During the 1980s the theatre renewed itself by growing younger, being directed for a long time by the team of Arto af Hällström and Raila Leppäkoski, both born in the early 1950s. It has also seen to it that its actors include top names of their generation, either under contract or as visitors. Today it has two director-producers, Mika Myllyaho (born 1966) and Esa Leskinen (born 1970).

Ryhmäteatteri has succeeded in creating a fairly heterogeneous audience: it has held on to many of its old members and succeeded in attracting new, younger viewers. It has not been afraid, either, of lengthy adaptations of the classics, of which Leskinen’s version of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, last year, was considered particularly fine. Last autumn’s repertoire included Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and the spring season offers Oliver Bukowski’s Bis Denver.

In 1969 a group was founded in association with the Swedish-language national theatre, Svenska Teatern, and was christened KOM (‘come’ in Swedish). Perhaps the group, with its leader, the director-actress-singer Kaisa Korhonen, was considered too radical (COMmunist, even), because in 1971 the group left the theatre and started anew, in Finnish.

KOM began as a touring theatre and gained its own permanent space only in 1978. In the early years of the 1970s it performed in the summer theatre on Suomenlinna, where, among others, the historical, comic chronicles written by Lauri Sipari contributed significantly to the growth of the group’s reputation.

Since 1984, KOM has been based in a former cinema in southern Helsinki. KOM has continued touring, and has also toured to a considerable extent abroad. Like Ryhmäteatteri, KOM is governed by a patrons’ association. Its artistic director has been, since the beginning of the 1980s, the director Pekka Milonoff. The permanent staff numbers more than a dozen. KOM has always also been a strong music theatre and has, among other things, made more than a dozen recordings.

The basis of the repertoire is formed by Finnish texts written specially for KOM. Among the classic authors it has performed are Brecht, Shakespeare and Chekhov. Among the great public successes of the current season are Tulkaa tytöt takaisin (‘Come back, girls’) by Juha Lehtola (born 1966) and Aina joku eksyy (‘Someone always gets lost’) by Reko Lundán (born 1971): they concern the family and the clan, a theme that has been typical of KOM in the 1990s. Actors tend to stay with the group, but they have always been joined by gifted young newcomers. One of the secrets of KOM’s success is that it has continually been able to attract new, young audiences – now in the second generation.

It is mainly the generation born in the 1960s who, ten years ago, made the decision to stay outside the institutional theatres. They were actors who had graduated from the Swedish-language course at the Theatre Academy. They wanted to make their own, relevant theatre, and as audiences they wanted to attract young people who did not usually go to the theatre.

The result was Viirus (‘Virus’), which acquired its own base from the City of Helsinki: an old pumping station on an island in the sea near Töölö in central Helsinki. The building was renovated, but the ‘raw’ industrial space was left in a state where it could easily be changed.

Viirus has presented European classics, contemporary texts and a number of Finnish premières, for example last year Molière’s Don Juan, Büchner’s Woyzeck, Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, Patrick Marber’s Closer. In the mid 1990s, the theatre also performed for a couple of summers on one of Helsinki’s islands, presenting Shakespeare’s As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which were, for the audience, adventure trips that took them all over the island. The group received a Finnish Award for Young Artists in 1996.

What is remarkable is that Viirus has succeeded in surmounting the language barrier: Finnish-speaking audiences, for whom compulsory ‘school Swedish’ (Swedish is spoken as a first language by only 6 per cent of the population) has not traditionally been very attractive, like to go to Viirus’s performances.

Q-teatteri (‘Q theatre’) developed as a joint project between like-minded theatrical amateurs and drama students in 1990: the majority of its members were born at the same time as the first theatre groups. Q was at first a theatre for a fairly unanimous generaton and homogeneous audience; its central figures were, in particular, the brothers Antti and Leo Raivio, who achieved a few tragi-comic dramas about childhoods in the 1970s which completely captivated their audiences. Antti Raivio is still the group’s artistic director.

Q has never shied away from slapstick comedy: theatre whose making, whether the play in question is a classic or some new text, has never been taken desperately seriously. Performances may include extraordinarily post-modern diversions from the illusion of theatre, which seem merely to increase the audience’s hilarity. It seems that the video generation is able to move with greater agility than its predecessors between real emotions and laughing at them.

Q has worked with texts made and directed for its own ensemble as well as adaptations of the classics including, last year, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace, a Hamlet in which the title role was played by the actress Leea Klemola and, this season, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in a new translation by Erik Söderblom, who is also the director.

The group has its base in an old cinema in the 1920s district of Töölö. A couple of years ago it acquired an additional auditorium in the shape of a former covered market next door where, in the spring of 1998, it presented an excellent interpretation, directed by Atro Kahiluoto, of the Finnish national epic, Kalevala in its historical birthplace: an audience of about 50 squeezed into the space, and the young actors demonstrated that the stories of the Kalevala can be really exciting on stage, quite free from the dust of a national treasure.

Outside Helsinki there are a few theatre groups in the sense currently defined by the law, all of them with their own spaces. The AHAA group, founded in Tampere in 1970, continues to tour as a theatre for children and young people, but has since 1993 had a permanent base in its home town. AHAA aims to use as the base of its repertoire texts which have been written for the theatre. Teatteri 2000 (‘Theatre 2000’), a children’s and young people’s theatre founded in 1985, is also based in Tampere.

Turun Uusi Teatteri (‘The New Theatre of Turku’) has been active in Turku since 1982, and has had its own base since 1987. It presents children’s theatre on tour as well as in Turku, and experimental theatre for adults.

The name of the KEHÄ III (‘RING ROAD III’) theatre refers to the Ring Road III, which separates the capital area from the rest of Finland. Vantaa, a city bordering Helsinki on the ring road, has no municipal theatre of its own. KEHÄ III was founded in 1986 to tour Vantaa as well as the rest of southern Finland. It has often produced European drama, for instance using texts by Marguerite Duras or George Tabori.

Teatteri Eurooppa Neljä (E4), is currently the only theatre group working outside the big cities. Since 1989 it has been based in an old vicarage in Saarijärvi in central Finland, but it is primarily a touring group, particularly to small places which are not often visited by professional groups. Its programme is not strictly defined, and includes, for example, both music shows and plays.

Among the most recent arrivals on the theatre-groups scene is Teatteri Takomo (‘The Forge Theatre’), whose moving spirit is the dramaturge and director Kristian Smeds (born 1970). It had its origins in a group of unemployed actors who put together a production entitled Jääkuvia (‘Ice images’) in an old tramshed in Helsinki. Its next offering was Ibsen’s Brand, after which it acquired and old workers’ meeting hall in a Helsinki suburb, where it presented a production about the Finnish post-war world of popular music. The building, and all the group’s props, were destroyed in an arson attack. Takomo took up temporary residence in a pumping station with a demolition order close to the Olympic stadium where, late last year, it produced, with a small company, Uncle Vanya, which was greeted by unanimous acclaim by both critics and audience..

Takomo to some extent approaches the character of the award-winning Théâtre de Complicité, which is well-known throughout Europe: ‘poor’ theatre which boldly uses the entire range of emotions of its actors – particularly its positive side which, in these post-(post?)-modern times, still seems surprisingly daring and unconventional. Most notable in Uncle Vanya was how extraordinarily wholly the group’s actors dedicated themselves to a work which it is possible to rehearse over a long period.

Takomo really is a ‘free theatre group’ in the sense that it lies outside the field defined by the legislation on theatres and can only apply for lottery funding for such groups (a total of FIM 1.3 million). Takomo and Universum, which is an umbrella organisation of four groups (two of them Swedish-language) fund their work through personal grants obtained by their staff, odd jobs and other work. It is possible for such groups to apply for protection under the law, but it is not an entirely simple process.

Most of the free groups have gradually become permanent companies, and they have understandably wished to obtain their fair share of the funds that the other forms of this branch of entertainment were enjoying. True, man does not live by bread alone, as Brecht said, but even producing circuses is not possible without bread.

The ideological enlightenment of the masses by the free groups in the 1960s, the cooperation with the working class, are history. The remnants of the ‘working class’ now quite happily watch en masse farces by Feydeau and foreign copyright musicals. Theatre groups or companies, are, however, still free to nurture idealism, to make their artistic dreams come true – provided they also manage to keep the box office busy; no tickets sold, no government funding either. This is what is known as relative freedom.

A’ free group’ like Takomo has been free to make theatre for instance for only a small audience at a time, not having to place its trust in the box office. But it is a vicious circle, really: you do what you feel is artistically right, get critical acclaim, but your next production (as well as the next payment of the rent on your apartment) is uncertain.

A delicate balance, then, the existence between artistic freedom and public funding? The theatre groups, ‘free’ to perform what they like, are expected to woo the spectators, i.e. the taxpayers, to make them turn up at the door and pay some more. So far this system seems to have been working fairly well – from the viewpoint of a critically minded friend of the art of theatre, at least.