Teija Hyvärinen
Does the soul have a gender?
‘If eels had a court, a large female would be sitting in the middle, and small males would be swaying around the throne like seaweed.’
Laura Ruohonen’s stage and radio plays are like their author. Much is spoken about them, but luckily it makes sense. The characters are serious, but funny. So is their writer. In recent years, she has directed her radio and stage plays herself.
‘But they wouldn't envy the queen, for they'd know that if they swim up rivers and into lakes, into sweet waters, they will themselves turn into females, large and heavy, and be able to rule and fold in their huge embrace the little skinny mail courtiers. All they need to do is wait.’
Many of Ruohonen’s texts, particularly her radio plays, have won prizes at home and abroad. Most recently, at the turn of the millennium she received the KOURA prize for her radio play Kuningatar K (‘Queen C’).
'It must benefit women in some way to throw a ball badly and all wrong. Why else would they do it.’
Ruohonen has studied biology, and the perspective of the natural sciences keeps her dramas in tune with the pulse of the moment, even when they are set in past centuries. For this reason, she even has the nerve to challenge the philosopher Descartes to debate; to answer the question, does the soul have a gender.
'A philosopher does not try to provide answers, but to pose questions so that old ways of thinking don't contaminate them by accident.’
The wildness of biological hypotheses makes Ruohonen’s texts dangerous and even frightening.
‘Eels can rise up onto dry ground and travel long distances and always find water even in a storm and pitch black. They find springs in deserts and save people from dying of thirst. And they can survive for four years without eating! Four!’
Although responsibility for nature is the formal subject of only two of Ruohonen’s works (the stage play Lintu vai kala [‘Fish or Fowl’, 1991] and the radio play Oluenpelastaja [‘The beer-savour’, 1998]), the characters, events and solutions of her plays take place in the landscape, and are part of it.
‘If I'd had a choice I wouldn't have been a count but a fisherman. Yes! It’s exciting and interesting, and you never know what you're going to catch.’
Ruohonen’s gender does not make her a feminist. But the fact that she writes with unflinching amiability about women, whether they are queens, lonely old people, generals’ widows, writers or scientists, makes her characters new and challenging.
‘From century to century, mothers teach their daughters and daughters teach their own daughters to throw the ball so that it misses the target. Why for God's sake? When they could follow their father's example and throw hard and far and hit the bulls-eye. But no, women imitate their mothers and throw the ball hardly six metres and all wrong and badly and miss. Just like that! Then they laugh and try to look cute. Like that!’
Ruohonen’s feminist humanism recalls another firebrand: Minna Canth, the pioneer of Finnish-language drama. Canth is, indeed, one of the three main characters in Ruohonen’s play, Suurin on rakkaus (‘Love is Paramount’, 1998).
‘Everything freezes up in this country, rivers, wells, reason, soul and thoughts. Everything.
Ruohonen wrote her first play, Nyrkkipyykki, when she had been at the Theatre Academy for a year. In it, a prodigal son returns home to a remote district where his mother lives alone. The boy has got mixed up in petty crime and, with his attempts to harbour stolen goods, causes a tragedy in the isolated community, which includes, in addition to his mother, his cousin and her boyfriend. In the end, the mother’s only son dies from a hasty dagger-thrust from the other man in the play. The attempt by these disadvantaged people to get rich quick through crime leaves them poorer than ever. The mother loses her son, the young couple each other, and the boy his life.
The characters of Nyrkkipyykki are outcasts, or at least belong to the country’s silent majority, if not its margins, whatever that decent people’s name for social security or pensions or earning a living by generally unacceptable methods may mean.
Her second play, Nousukas (‘The arriviste’), also takes place far from centres of development. In it, a young woman comes home with her cultivated man-friend in order to save her small businessman father from bankruptcy and from his treacherous new wife. The inevitable collision between relatives and childhood friends with the new partners of father and daughter develops into a kind of carnival tango in the cold summer night, and none of the company survives unscathed.
‘Here up north we're so poor we can't afford poor taste; all thoughts and ideas must be stripped down and streamlined like architecture. In France, you're rich and can call a good restaurant The Dog’s Fart, for instance, without anybody batting an eye’.
The setting of the play Lintu vai kala is somewhere in the north, far from the innovative south, but nevertheless in the vanguard of destructive development. A biological research station has to make way for the tourism industry and activity that promotes biodiversity for scientific business.
‘It looked at me the way one looks for the very first time, the first time, full of wonder, fresh, without lust, hate, love, disgust, tenderness or ownership.’
Olga is a moving play about the desire for life and the rebellion of an old woman who lives alone. When Olga notices that her relatives and surviving acquaintances are hoping for her death, she stops caring for the rules of convention. The young Rundis, an outcast and loser, also tries to exploit the old woman, but finds Olga defeats him. Unnecessary to others, these two creatures form an alliance and for a moment they become each others’ only friends. At the end of the play, Olga is left alone and gives up her rich life. In the performance, the actress left the stage by symbolically cutting a piece of silk fabric in two. The most beautiful stage death I have ever seen!
‘Without any prejudices, with eyes that leave us both unconquered, unexplained and free.’
Suurin on rakkaus (1998) marks Ruohonen’s turn to the past: she places her characters in a world which represents a common national and European cultural legacy. The play is based loosely on the writer Juhani Aho’s love affair with the mother of another writer of the turn of the 20th century, Arvid JŠrnefelt. The third main character of the play, the writer Minna Canth, who in her time attracted a great deal of disapproval, completes the trio of kindred spirits. The play depicts unconventional love and comradeship, the influence of personal life and decisions on artistic life and personal moral values. Its power and persuasiveness lie in the text’s astonishing similarity with the phenomena of our time. It does not attempt to paint the social or historical environment. Suurin on rakkaus trusts the energies between the characters and succeeds, through them, in cleaving basic questions and problems of human life.
‘A large black eel, thick as a rope, was lifted from the well at the night, and the queen bent over to look at its silvery sides and powerfully whipping tail, but the eel looked the queen straight in the eye and into her heart, and she was never the same again.’
Ruohonen’s new text, Kuningatar K (Queen C), which has already won prizes, marks, in my opinion, a completely new departure. In it, the significance of gender, in the natural sciences, history and philosophy, receives a magnificent interpretation in the mysterious Queen Christina, monarch of Sweden during the period when the country was a great power. Ruohonen’s queen is intelligent, daring, jealous and so self-centred that she believes everything is, for her, both permissible and possible. Christina makes herself god-like. The transparent motif of Queen C is associated with eels.
‘There's an eel living in the castle well and il'll soon be a hundred years old. That's why the water is so clear and fresh, it eats all the frogs and maggots that try to settle there, it's strong as a rope, black and shiny and its eyes glow in the dark if you look down. Good water for drinking, good water for washing.’
The eel, the mythical well-cleanser, is a sacrifice, a saviour, to which Christina becomes as attached as to her own image. When the eel disappears, Christina abandons her crown and leaves Sweden, refusing the most important task of a queen, giving birth to a royal heir.
‘Never. I refuse to believe that of such a fine, interesting, magnificent animal, it is impossible to say that its sole mission in life is to mate and lay eggs somewhere.’
Despite its apparent geniality, Queen C is a dazzlingly poetic, startling work, to whose multi-dimensional themes one hopes the writer will return in the future.
‘It is known that Christina was buried in Rome, but what was buried when she was buried? Nobody knows. The coffin is full of silk and the secrets of a lonely woman.’
Laura Ruohonen’s most recent play Suomies (‘The bog-man’), will receive its première at the KOM Theatre, Helsinki, in the autumn of 2000.
The quotations are from Laura Ruohonen’s radio play Queen C, translated by Hilkka Pekkanen and Diana Tullberg.
Laura Ruohonen
Laura Ruohonen’s three latest plays were staged at the Finnish National Theatre. She has written several radio plays, which have been translated into many languages. Her radio play Beersaviour was chosen as the best radio play of 1989, and the radio play Big Ape received a prize in a Nordic competition for radio plays. Her first full-length feature film, Bittersweet (1995), won two Jussis (the Finnish equivalent of the Oscars).
Plays Nousukas (‘The upstart’, 1990), Nyrkkipyykki (‘Wash up’, 1989), Lintu vai kala (‘Fish or fowl’, 1991, translated into English), Olga (1995, translated into English, Lithuanian, Russian, Suurin on rakkaus (‘Love Is Paramount1998).
Her radio plays include Oluenpelastaja(‘Beersaviour’, 1989, translated into German, English, Bulgarian and Slovenian), Iso apina (‘Big ape’, 1990, translated into English, French, Swedishg, Norwegian, Felemish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Kuningatar K, Koura prize for best radioplay 1999 (‘Queen C’, 1999, translated into English).