ILPO TUOMARILA:

To be a playwright?

 What it is
Substrate

I was born in 1948 in Paimio, near the former Finnish capital of Turku. This capital privilege, which was lost more than a century ago, continues to weigh heavily on the emotional and intellectual atmosphere of the area.

I was born mute in a speechless region of south-west Finland. Not that speech-like communication is not practised in this peculiar area in its strange dialect; but making sounds in an informative sense to one’s nearest and dearest is a matter of avoiding facts and speaking beside the point. Such a stylisation creates drama and comedy in everyday life. I have tried to draw on it.

New ideas from both east and west have, throughout history, first arrived in Finland via Turku, but without making any great difference to the souls of south-west Finland. This strange corner of the country, to which I have, after my Wandrerjahre, humbly returned to live here for part of the year, forces me to think and thus to write about things in the form of drama. Things are not spoken of with their true names, and silence has a central communication task: these matters, after all, are among the criteria of a good play.

Only a few of my plays are set around the old capital, but my narrative methods and approaches represent what is known as the south-west Finnish avant garde. The humour of people of this area is a little ‘British’. It cultivates hidden meanings and is embarrassingly often impenetrable to outsiders.

As someone who set out from these landscapes, I am, as a dramatist, in the habit of exploring any subject through a comic method of my own creation. And the basis of this method is: yes is the same as no. Often, my vision of the world and of Finnishness has failed to be ‘politically correct’.

When I wrote a play about Marshal Herman Göring in my own manner, I was slandered or corrected because I had approached a sensitive matter in the wrong genre. Apparently I did not realise whose side I was on, and I did not understand which matters could be written about in which way.

Because of my background, I shall never be correct in terms of politics or accepted taste. No dramatist should be. I have, it is true, tried to school myself in the understanding of predominant trends by, for example, watching Laurel and Hardy for weeks on end. The influence of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy has, of course, been in the opposite direction.

What for

Since 1993, I have been the director of Turku City Theatre. Directing a theatre is a miserable job for a playwright, but not as miserable a job as it generally is. The compulsory social life my work brings with it has been beneficial to the writing process. This despite the fact that the task of the dramatist is to convey information from the world outside the theatre. The dramatist should bring into the theatre challenges, tests, disparagement, or the continual questioning of the art form.

The dramatist is not a dramaturge, but a free and easy character who should have his own handwriting.

In what one might call work matters, the audience has come closer. Writing has become a concrete goal. The question is, naturally, of interaction, when one understands it. This has also had me approaching styles I have not tried before, particularly the despised, mocked but popular musical. I wrote my first play in a music-theatre direction on the basis of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his work Night is Near.

Even in writing this play, I encountered an interesting problem: can real or even tragic human destinies, collapses of the mind, relationship violence, be brought into the world of musicals? I began to write music theatre as if it were drama and was able to experience, together with the audience, realisations when incompatible things, set side by side, opened up the entire paradoxical range of life.

So-called entertainment took on, within a realist play, a discordant but very effective function. In my next play, Hennala Brass Band, we went still further. The play is set in Finland at the time of the civil war of 1918. The war, between the White and Red forces, was particularly bloody and vengeful. The journey of the brass band and of the Red women’s guard that protected it through the war to the prison camp formed the core of the play which, together with a reshaped form of ‘battle and brass-band music’, liberated in audiences the memory-traumas which this civil war has left in the nation.

Not battle lines but human destinies were of importance in the great sweep of history. Audiences saw the lot of humanity.

At present the TTT Theatre of Tampere is preparing its next drama and musical mix or sauce for its first night. It tells of the tragi-legendary exploiter of women, Ruben Oskar Auervaara, the Don Juan of Finland. In this work, women’s destinies appear in extreme or over-romantic terms, from the basic catalogue of operetta. Thus an attempt is made to find a ‘real’ use for operetta – the function it has had in the world that is bigger than operetta.

A dramatic text, and in particular a radio play or a film short story, can be developed through smells, tastes or emotional states. The process undergone by the republic of Finland demands a subject in order to take shape. At this moment, one must see through chaotic self-centredness to the great arch of history.

I have often taken my subjects from recent history, or the important figures of culture or politics. Conflict between the generations or the sexes often form the extract from a social watershed, which in Finland is often accompanied by religious and sexual chaos.

In her foreword to my selected plays, Professor Irmeli Niemi has succeeded in crystallising my themes: ‘Many of Tuomarila’s plays depict a survival story turned upside down: what is interesting is why people do not survive and who does not survive.’

‘Over people lies the threat of a life lived in vain. Painful helplessness radiates paralysingly into its environment, but the result is not a melodrama ending in a dead end, but a deadly serious game of the imagination that opens up in many directions. Sooner or later, the active and feeling person is forced to encounter a reality which he cannot – and does not need to – flee.’

Getting a play on to paper is the first step. For many years, I have worked on my plays together with the director Katariina Lahti, who is also my partner. I have never directed my own works. It suits some people to do everything themselves, but if a dramatist questions the theatre, the producer must question the new text. Again and again, until both, the producer and the writer, can say that it is ready. Then the producer must refine it into a performance. The playwright’s prize is the first night. When you have painfully struggled through the light summer nights, you can, with failing knees and in the darkness of autumn, approach the festivities of the first night, which are in fact pure hell: my first-night phobia worsens every year.

 

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Ilpo Tuomarila

Born Paimio 3 November 1948
Freelance writer since 1974
Dramaturge, Turku City Theatre, 1991-2
Director, Turku City Theatre, 1992-
More than 50 published or performed texts
Translated into Swedish, Estonian, German, English, Russian

Major works:

Impivaaran patruunat (‘The squires of Impivaara’, 1976), Ei kuki omenapuu (‘No apple-tree blossoms’, 1977), Sankarin sydän (‘The heart of the hero’, 1978), Koristepuuseppä (‘The decorative carpenter’, 1981), Yössä Gehennan (‘Gehenna night’, 1984), Exit (1987), Göring (1989), Rentun Ruusu (‘Rose of Renttu’, 1992), Taulahänta ja Kivenhakkaaja (1993), Yö on hellä (‘Tender is the night’, 1995), Mäntyranta se oli (‘It was Mäntyranta’), Hennalan torvisoittokunta (‘Hennala Brass Band’, 1998), Auervaara eli Kaunis valhe (‘Auervaara or the dangerous lie’, 2000)

Translated into English: Yössä Gehennan (‘Gehenna night’), Göring
Translated into German: Jerusalemin tanssi (‘Jerusalem dance’)

Awards:

Lea Prize, 1985 (Best Play of the Year)
Thalia Prize 1988 (Best Theatre Act)
Kritiikin punnus 1999 (Critics’ Prize)