TL;DR: My friends created an impressive play. Here I analyse it in contrast with two British performances, all of which discuss political history.
Yesterday, Suden nälkä was chosen to be the opening act at the largest amateur performers' festival in Finland this January! This is quite tremendous for a first feature-length play. Hence I'll extend these uncultivated congratulations to my two dear friends and the writer-directors, Vilja and Sara, by posting this essay I wrote about the performance a while back. Building the bandwagon before folks can climb on it, savvy.
It was originally for The Activist Stage theatre studies course at the University of Glasgow, instructed by Dr Stephen Greer.
Bur first, let me share my first impressions of the play after watching the final cut as a recording:
Now, for the more lengthy version.
Using documentary material to leverage the past, present, and future. Case studies of Scum: Death, Destruction and Dirty Washing, The Colour of Justice, and Suden nälkä.
Aoife Monks, in discussing representations of history, maintains that
Re-presenting the past has been key to a feminist engagement with the future: by offering a sense of multiple pasts, by activating the silent voices of history, feminist directors, writers and critics have suggested new possibilities for change (2006:88).
In this essay, I discuss the approaches to representing history taken by Finnish theatre-makers Sara Koiranen and Vilja Lehtonen in their newborn play on the civil war of 1918, Suden nälkä, the Monstrous Regiment in Scum: Death, Destruction and Dirty Washing (1976), commenting on feminist issues of 1970s Britain, and Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor in their Tricycle play The Colour of Justice (1999). The common denominators for the analysed works include their reliance on historical documents, such as court material and recorded memories. Both Suden nälkä (‘hunger of a wolf’) and Scum stage a historical milieu that took place a century before the production, the former to shed light on the past, and the latter to articulate the present. The Colour of Justice has a stake in commenting on a contemporary injustice, to change the future of similar occurrences. I argue that the aims and claims at accurate representation of people, documents, and memory within the spectrum of documentary and non-documentary theatre is well measured within these works, each according to their aim, which I will break into rectifying the past, changing the present, and preventing future injustices. The translations from Finnish are mine, unless otherwise mentioned.
Although the essay will discuss the extents of verbatim material in depth, I will begin with giving a brief overlook of the main works discussed and their deployment of original historical documents. In Suden nälkä, verbatim documents used extensively as research material, and deployed directly in certain chosen scenes. The play has a strong grounding in the available historical research, not least as the other writer, Sara Koiranen, has completed a bachelor’s thesis in political history on the topic. Scum employs verbatim and original documents in monologues and political dialogue, while The Colour of Justice is entirely compiled of the court hearings on the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, well discussed in British media as the shortcomings and failures of the investigation came to light.
I will now expose some cultural context for Suden nälkä, which premiered in Jo-jo theatre on 5th October 2018. With its focus on women on the losing side, the socialist ‘Reds’, the performance inevitably places itself on the underdog’s side of the general discursive canvas.
Until the 1960s, the ‘official’, administrative, and the media voice concerning the uprising was told, printed, reproduced, and disseminated by the victors, ‘the Whites’. This imbalance of recorded history has meant that cultural works around the civil war have sometimes had a flavour of responding to a burden of proof for motivations to the Red insurgence.
Recently, the staged experience has moved away from a necessity to justify and nearer to an aim of understanding. The fictional Red’s motivation to join the army is now ‘To feel alive, at least once’ (Veriruusut, Kanto and Maijala, 2017), or because it ‘feels right’ (Suden nälkä). These personal reasonings are replacing such grand political statements as ‘because the working class doesn’t seem to gain its rights unless they’re taken', as uttered by the main Red character, Koskela, in the first popular red-sympathetic work (Linna, Under The North Star, 1960, translated in 2002).
Historical research on the bloody aftermath of prison camps and their appalling death rates has only rather recently argued for gendered and systematic violence towards the women who fought on the losing side. Liukkonen’s PhD in Sociology argues, amongst other previously perhaps underscored memories, that rape and purposeful spread of STDs in the prison camp of Hennala was systematic and casual (Liukkonen, 2018). The class and political prisoner status of the Red women contributing to gendered violence aimed at them was, surely, a large part. As a blanket statement, it could be said that the White, official, victor’s history has had the general and documented benefit of proof upon it, while the Red history is more distinctly individual due to the socio-political circumstances that were instantiated in Finland post-civil war.
The emerging research is relevant to Suden nälkä as a micro-historical play. The extent to which traumatised memories of horror can be credible sources of sociological argument has been questioned by the community of Finnish historians; Liukkonen has been called out for going out of the historian’s reach in employing memories of prisoners as evidence for her research, as the gaps and absences in existing official material, such as destroyed court documents has prevented historians from digging deeper under the research conventions (Kaleva, 2018). The memorised is thus inherently personal, and in the case of an extremely sensitive political event, polarised experience. However, the prisoner’s memories do testify to experienced horrors that took place on the camps. Whether they are generalisable, the trauma that the prisoners had was the only alternative reading of the events, in the absence of a public platform of a history of the losers. On this terrain, the theatre-maker can perhaps viably go further than the academic historian in respecting and exploring the memories, and this is what Koiranen and Lehtonen set out to do.
A refocussing of the artist’s objective to the micro-historical, to events in smaller communities or even those of individuals, has also shifted the interrogation of the legitimacy and validity of armed conflict from the generally applicable to that of the personal. In an interview with me, Koiranen questioned whether a micro-historical look requires basing characters explicitly on certain, existing humans, and the extent to which it is reasonable and ethical. A character, especially one written explicitly as more fictitious than an existing individual, no longer bears the burden of proving the whole political event, inasmuch their personal motivation. In Suden nälkä, the events are based on historical documents, while the characters are fictional as individuals. Lehtonen explains that
... one of the reasons to write entirely new characters was to respect the families of Red individuals. It is not our intention to create biographical accounts. Despite an abundance of interrogation transcripts, we would not have been able to construct whole humans by mere archival remarks … We are not interested in the reproduction of military history, but in the phenomena around the events. (Ketonen, 2018).
Koiranen expanded on this, noting that these official accounts sometimes contradict each other, and interpreting the incomplete contemporary documents is not a conclusive business. She maintains that it would have been impossible to draw ‘accurate’ equivalences between the responses given in court and the people. Their chosen form of a history play required the building of a character outside the justice system and the interrogations, which is the whole premise of the play; to answer what happened to these women before they appeared before the temporary courts in the early summer of 1918.
Next, I want to ask what this refocussing of validation has meant to the construction of the characters, and which parallels and differences may be drawn with Scum as a criticism of masculine-centric Marxism. Kruger’s starting note on her article on feminist theatre in Britain during Thatcherism invokes discussion on the spectacle of the feminine as a revolutionary image:
There is a saying that women have always made spectacles of themselves. However, it has been only recently, and intermittently, that women have made spectacles themselves. On this difference turns the ambiguous identity of a feminist theater (1990).
The identities of Red Women were heavily subversive of the conventional femininity of the time. One could read the inclusion of the women in the guards, receiving equal pay to men (unheard of in most industries), optimistically as an enactment of social democratic principles of gender equality, or, pessimistically, as a result of the dire need of healthy recruits in the revolutionary army. The truth can well be a combination of both, and yet the Red Guards were the only reference groups in which women could perform the same tasks as men, with (promised) equal pay, and with things like equally convenient clothing, wearing trousers for the first time in their lives. With a promise of sharing necessities like food to the needy, their motivations could be seen as emancipatory. Tiina Lintunen supports the interpretation that women were especially active on the Red side of the civil war due to the demands of gender equality in the workers’ movement at the time (Lintunen, 2015). This echoes strongly on Monstrous Regiment’s Gillian Hanna's reasons to look at 1870s Parisian women in arguing for her and her contemporaries’ liberation and the failure of British Marxists to include women in the 1970s:
When we read the list of what they were agitating for—equal pay, provision of crèche facilities for working women, education for girls, equal opportunities for women—we could see that we had a lot in common with these women. We had the vote, to be sure, but it didn’t seem to us that a great deal more had been achieved in one hundred years.
However, this testing of societal boundaries of the Finnish insurgents faced ferocious backbite afterwards. A widely cited, perhaps one of the most openly eugenic accounts by the author Ilmari Kianto contended infamously that ‘In hunting a wolf, the aim is perhaps rather more appropriate on the female than the male, for the hunter knows that a she-wolf gives birth to equally wicked bastards… It has been proven, that the Red Guards are predators, many of their women wolf-bitches… Isn’t it madness not to shoot the beasts agonising us?' (1918).
Ideas of ‘racial hygiene’ and the degeneracy of the working-class woman were apparently common and widely repeated in the White Guards, and according to Liukkonen and Lintunen, informed the executions of female soldiers; nearly all of those shot were factory workers from the cities, while the overwhelming majority of working-class women came from rural backgrounds. In addition, their average age was only 20, the youngest convicts being 14 (Liukkonen, 2018).
The end of the Red feminine revolution was not a gunfight, but a radical absence; a nothing. The protagonist Johanna’s death is alienated. She sits down and lies stagnantly, her back to the audience and resting against a pillar on the stage, for the duration of a lengthy monologue by friend Anna, and when Anna is informed of her own release, the fact of Johanna’s death by malnutrition, or disease, dawns upon her from her unresponsiveness. Naomi Klein speaks of species extinction as not a show or a statement, as we would think them to be, but something more insidious; an absence, a radical nothing. Most extinctions take place when fertility in a population recedes such that the young survive no longer (2015: 368). This inglorious decease on stage could be read as a commentary on mass political murder as an extinction, rather than a ‘hunt’, as the enactors of Kianto’s allies in thought seeked.
This is a testimony to the hiddenness of horrors from the peripheral violence that revolved in society after the Civil War. Similar things are going on in the restaging of Stephen Lawrence’s trial in The Colour of Justice. Clapp (1999) maintained that the organic and unspectacular sounds and surroundings of the naturalistic reimagination of the courtroom painted the platform on which the gruesome, infuriating, and doubt-inducing evidence presented stuck out like sore thumbs. The politics of the real isn’t spectacular. It takes place within the same discourses, on the same fonts, with the same voices and the same language as the everyday discussion. In Suden nälkä, the insidious nature of being let down doesn’t come with a bang, but with the stage image of a silent, starving woman. Stephen’s mother, Doreen Lawrence, gave a statement on the police conduct, read by her sister on the 14 February 1997, about the ‘wall of silence [being] not only in the surrounding area where my son was killed but with police officers investigating the crime’. (Norton-Taylor, 2012). This silence reverberates around the institutions of law meant to protect the people that these plays were based on.
I will now move to discuss the motivations and context of the devising of Scum. Heddon and Milling, in looking at how the processes of theatre-making can be politically motivated in themselves, noted that the politicisation of British society in the 70s, such as increased trade unionisation, contributed to theatre-makers responding (2005). Often, the responses were an eagerness to deviate from bourgeois hierarchies of superiors and employees, resulting in choosing devising as a form of creation. Anyhow, due to Scum's intended writers being moved around with jobs, the script was not devised in as immediate communication with the production team as the creators originally wanted, hence blocking the initial planning of collective creation, or ‘participatory democracy’.
Hanna, in an interview with Sarah Sigal, said that part of the dissatisfaction the performers felt with the original script ‘emerged from the performers’ strong identification with the women of the commune; company members wanted to perform what they felt was the truth of the experiences of the Communards, which they felt they could convey in their own words’ (Sigal, in Syssoyeva et al, 2016). To expand on the original script, which was mainly imagined in wording, the rest of the creative group used 'historical documents, such as speeches and pamphlets as the basis for much of the show’s political dialogue and monologues’ (ibid). It seems that the historical documents were in part used as a check-and-balance to inform the performers of the inner lives and opinions of the women they depicted.
Alas, for the scope of research in this essay, I do not have viable evidence to discuss the tones and contexts of the staging of the verbatim in Scum much further. This disclaimer is needed to highlight a gap in my evidence; Gillian Hanna’s book The Monstrous Regiment : four plays and a collective celebration (1991) would have offered both the playscripts and Hanna’s original commentary, but unfortunately, the copy has gone missing in the university’s library. Were I able to continue working on this topic longer, I would likely be able to request a copy from another university library, but at this stage I will merely have to note this inadequacy.
From what I can adduce from the existing material, the creators of Scum used contemporary statements and speeches as a way to strike a difference between the identification that the performers experienced to the plight of the Paris communards, and the obvious differences in the lived political experience that existed between them. There is a kind of lending of agency at play in not imagining the politics, but empathising and embodying the every-day, of an activist sailing under the same flag a century before, having found yourself in something resembling square one. The acting styles were gestic and Brechtian, to highlight the alienation from species-being in a patriarchal world (Aston 1995: 75).
This is in contrast with deployments of verbatim in Suden nälkä, where two scenes where historical speech is used as a scene to subvert meaning, with the only character based on a single existing person. A revolutionary leader Tuomas Hyrskymurto repeats speeches, which were public verbatim during the uprising, but cannot be pinpointed to exactly one author (Koiranen, 2018). During a projected speech announcing the revolutionary government having taken over Helsinki, he breathes heavily and eyes at the camera combatively. In the second projection, where he argues for the justification of the confiscation of food, especially that of butter, in February 1918, the actor devours on real butter, fat dripping from his face and the glass screen between the camera and himself receiving a share of splashing butter. The original written material, official in tone, receives an ironic, perhaps mocking or merely questioning treatment from Koiranen and Lehtonen. The mode of staging the leaders’ addresses in this way becomes evidently important through its effects on the characters’ responses stemming from humanity, sense of reverence to authority, and a certain herd mentality.
After witnessing the address, the women become more or less convinced that they ought not to be judged for consuming the stolen butter they have received from the revolution’s workers in the town square. They begin to chant a slogan of the revolution, ‘the content have no right to condemn the hungry’, breaking the fourth wall and screaming to a point where I, as an audience member, felt initially convinced, and later again questioned the intended integrity of this scene. Speaking analytically, the verbatim address from the revolutionary leader motivates the imagined response from the personal characters. Phenomenologically, the mixture of gross splashing of the good in shortage and the chanting ad absurdum invite a reading that political motivation is not impersonal, nor free from material conditions; hunger and other distress from necessities allure deviation from comfortable common sense. The scene being so strongly tied to material deprivation lends credit to a Marxist reading of the play and, taking it even further, criticises the revolutionary leaders for exploiting and agitating the civilians into insurgents. Similar threads are present in Scum employing alienating methods and direct audience address (Aston 1995).
However, I contend that Suden nälkä is not a Marxist play, especially when contrasted with Scum, or its precedent, the open humanitarian reading of the Reds in a classic work, Under the North Star. Koskela, after much toiling and personal experiences of gross injustice from landlords joins the Red Guards out of a burn of the ideology, and voices such living quotations as ‘the national interest is always the interest of the elite; and they are not wrong, for theirs this country is’ (Linna & Impola, 2002). This is not unlike Gillian Hanna’s feminist criticism of 1970s British Marxism when she maintains that the feminine experience is such that ‘You are born into a world which belongs to somebody else, it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to men’ (1978: 4).’ Suden nälkä leaves too many of these threads open, too much room for the fact that people often drift, rather than blast towards uprising, to be a play with a Marxist belief in ends and goals. Their characters do not go into the fight out of belief in dialectic materialism, but out of a vague hope that ‘in a century from now, children will ask “who started all of this?” and the city will shout my name’. Their actions are not rationalised, for the play contends that humans sometimes just end up; not each of the Red soldiers had faced gross injustices, and fictionalising them only as ‘Koskelas’ would miss the point of banality, of humanity, in the nature of the extremist agent.
This aspect of the play shows that there are viable politically active characters to be written without their backstories being Mary Sue –like epitomes of oppression. Crossing the limit of violence in politics invites readings that interpret the extremists’ actions as rational given their circumstances; but in real life, the intersections of rationality, informed choice, and personal experience rarely coincide with the storyteller’s convention. Hence, Suden nälkä undermines the notion that a credible historical radical on stage has to have a solid rationale, or that they have to represent the struggle they fight for perfectly. It treads the culture-political line of representing socialists with empathy as humans, but without unrequited sympathy for the praxis. An uninformed public makes for a mob rule, or simply bad decision-makers. Further reading of Monstrous Regiment and Scum would be likely to expose similarities or differences in how they saw oppression, emancipation, and the feminine as a public question rather than a personal journey.
In The Colour of Justice, the incompleteness and open-endedness of human decision-making is, however, the theatrical effect by which the committers of injustice can be detected and criticised. The clumsy sentences, ‘uhms’, and the perplexing ‘I-can’t-remembers’ themselves are part of the failure where these police officers, with their biases, were focussed on as individuals and not as parts of the institution of violence monopoly in Metropolitan London – and thus to be held more accountable. Kent, on the natural colloquialities of verbatim, maintained in an interview with Dominic Cavendish that ‘this [The Colour of Justice] shouldn't turn into a pillorying of the police. It would be wrong if it turned into some form of medieval entertainment … Aside from the fact that very few of the sentences make grammatical sense, I wondered whether it was fair to set down in stone remarks made by the police while being questioned’. However, it is precisely in these gaps of our language that our incompetence may show.
I have argued that the appropriate application of historical documentary material from the viewpoints of ethics and integrity varies by the ends of the performance. In arguing for the visibility and wellbeing of contemporaneous women, Scum uses documents to demarcate between the shared experience of repression of the historical subjects and the performers, and the unique political experience of the Parisian woman. Suden nälkä, with its aspirations to state untold stories and understand the undiscussed from a century ago, creates a safe anonymity to the women whose privacy and public engagement were considered equally condemnable and intertwined in their own time. The Colour of Justice replicates recent public addresses to the critical spectating eye, with the end of not ending with retribution to the particular injustice, but with a rationale to expose the institutions that, unless rectified, may reiterate similar injustices. These plays, with respect to the role that the individuals share in telling the story of political change, as identifiable sisters, as forgotten radicals, as an ordinary, contemporary family with an enormous trauma, would likely not function as political empowerment, education, or call to change, were their methodologies switched around.
Bibliography
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Monstrous Regiment : four plays and a collective celebration. London: Nick Hern, 1991. Print.
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“Voiko muistikuviin luottaa? Väitös Hennalan joukkomurhasta synnytti tutkijakiistan.” (“Can memories be trusted? A PhD on Hennala’s mass murdering gave rise to an academic dispute.”) Article in the newspaper Kaleva, kaleva.fi, 5.5.2018.
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Jo-Jo Teatteri: Suden nälkä. 2018. Recording of preview on 4 Oct 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ0kSgYET2g. 31 Oct. 2018.
Kruger, Loren. "The Dis-Play's The Thing: Gender And Public Sphere In Contemporary British Theater." Theatre Journal 42.1, 1990. 27.
Linna, Väinö, and Richard Impola. Under The North Star 2: The Uprising. Beaverton, Ontario: Aspasia Books, 2002. Print.
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Monks, Aoife. “Predicting the Past: Histories and futures in the Work of Women Directors.” in Harris, Geraldine, and Elaine Aston, eds. Feminist futures?: theatre, performance, theory. Springer, 2006: 88.
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Sigal, Sarah. “Monstrous Regiment: The Gendered Politics of Collaboration, Writing, and Authorship in the UK from the 1970s Onwards.” In Syssoyeva, Kathryn M., and Scott Proudfit. Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance: The Rise of Women Theatre Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2016. 31 Oct. 2018.
Image sources:
Tristram Kenton for Tricycle Theatre. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/oct/22/richard-norton-taylor-verbatim-tribunal-plays-stephen-lawrence
Jouni Kuru for Jo-jo Theatre. Retrieved from https://jo-joteatteri.com/wordpress/?portfolio=suden-nalka-jo-jo-teatteri-turku
Unnamed photographer for the Monstrous Regiment. Retrieved from http://www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/companies/monstrous-regiment/
The event for Suden nälkä was here, I bet they'll be posting more as the festival show comes closer.
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