MATTI LINNAVUORI

‘Writing grows into the rest of life’

 

In the programme for his production for the Finnish National Theatre of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, Reko Lundán ponders, among other things, his own writing through the above title. Not, in other words, directing, as you might expect from the context. Of course, The Seagull has two writers, alongside whom it is natural for the director, too, to ponder whether, as an artist, he resembles someone, and what he is like.

It is natural to Lundán that he combines incommensurate matters and objects. In his play Ettemme harhaan kääntyis (‘Lest we turn astray’), the director of a global bank rejoices because he has finally found the right boat to sail around the world in. The actor held in his hand a brush, its bristles upturned. That was his leisure yacht.

In the theatre of objects, Lundán is perhaps like his Finnish contemporaries Kristian Smeds and Esa Kirkkopelto, as well as the on the tracks of the country’s strongest director, the controversial Jouko Turkka. Like them, Lundán wanted and created an overall aesthetic of his own in his first works after graduating from the Theatre Academy by functioning also as his own set and costume designer.

Lundán gives objects and mismatched matters significance in the same way as his ideal writing of the title. He does not squeeze metaphor through the agreement of theatre, not through imagination or with self-serving dazzle, but with sincerity and, in his most recent work, with a tender, masculine longing.

‘I want writing to be born like breathing, to grow into the rest of life like a burl into a tree,’ Lundán wrote.

Lundán was born in 1969. In his productions, he often uses pop songs from the early 1970s. Is it possible that the future director lived his early childhood so strongly and consciously that signs of the times were already imprinting themselves on his memory? It must be remembered that in Finland before the beginning of the 1970s not enough recordings were published to date a whole evening’s play. Music is helpful when Lundán sets The Seagull in a Finnish lakeside cottage in the 1970s or Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in a stuffy, concrete small Finnish town of the same period. The music of the time, however, is only a seasoning. The main thing is Lundán’s sensitive understanding of early childhood. In almost all the plays he has written himself, at least one character grieves over how cruel the others are to innocent, gullible children. Children’s suffering is the subject of the plays Budapest Bengal Tigers, Drakarna över Helsingfors and Aina joku eksyy (‘Someone always gets lost’), which was, in about 240 performances over a period of two years, an exceptional success.

As the father of two small daughters, Lundán remains constantly in contact with childhood, and can write with impressive emotionality. Aina joku eksyy was born of an enormous number of prose fragments which the actor ensemble, together with Lundán, shaped into scenes and then into theatre. In practical terms, the only scenery is a large, slanting wooden floor whose trap-doors are, alternately, the graves of relatives and desks in a school classroom. Lundán has pruned as few as possible objects from his object theatre. His actors create the atmosphere. Lundán has said that he does not necessarily write classical scenes about the conflict between two wills; instead, an atmosphere can be the subject of the scene. In order for this not to appear naïve, bold stylisation is necessary, and the brisk, Meyerholdian rhythm characteristic of Lundán. But when Lundán interpolates loud laughter into his angst-ridden subjects, it is not light relief. It is like breathing, a self-evident attachment to the whole of life. Life really is all sorts of things together, and not merely one kind of thing, channelled by the will of the writer.

In Lundán’s depictions of childhood, the mother may be an alcoholic, as in the orienteering play Aina joku eksyy. The big brother, a model, may be a drug addict, as in the dramatisation of the Helsinki family chronicle Drakarna šver Helsingfors, which was also shaped with input from the actors. Someone is always missing; some god-like figure has left his protégé alone. The force that leaves the characters in the lurch is named God only in the Italian playwright Luigi Lunari’s salon comedy Kolme miestä venettä vailla (‘Three men without a boat’, from the original Tre sull’altina’), which, without this addition, does not really sit in the continuum of Lundán’s interest.

The child’s experience also concerns Lundán’s play about economic policy, Ettemme harhaan kääntyis, in which the small state of Finland is like a helpless baby. The only freedom of the state is the freedom to be responsible for its debts, and that freedom grows stronger all the time.

At the Theatre Academy, Lundán favoured productions rehearsed in a week or two. Perhaps it was his intelligence that made the young Lundán impatient. In later productions, he has been a good listener and a considerate mentor, and not only in the familiar surroundings of the KOM Theatre. Raivoavan enkelin syli (‘The embrace of the furious angel’) takes place in ancient Rome in phrases whose verbal images include conformity, although Lundán is already seeking the psychological size of death by cleansing expression of the unnecessary. Lund‡n revealed himself as a director of tragedy most recently in his production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman for Helsinki City Theatre, in which he combined a classical ineluctability and clear-minded Finnish fear.

Reko Lundán

Plays:
Raivoavan enkelin syli ( The embrace of the furious angel) 1994,Rosvot ja poliisit (Cops and robbers), 1994, Budapest Bengal Tigers, 1996, Ettemme harhaan kääntyis (Lest we turn astray), 1997, Aina joku eksyy (Someone always gets lost) 1998 translated into Swedish and German)

Adaptations:
Drakarna över Helsingfors (Kites above Helsinki), 2000.