DRAAMA Festival Day 5: Satire! and Angst

It's Day 5, and by now the festival is starting to drag its way towards the inevitable finish line. The delegates of the Baltic Forum have settled into their daily routines, and we go to the theatre with a very 'once more unto the breach, dear friends' sort of attitude. Not that it's a chore, exactly, just that watching show after show is kind of exhausting. Being in a theatre audience is also a labour - and nothing makes you more conscious of this than watching 4-5 hours of theatre each day. That's a third of waking hours.

Tomorrow is Conference Day, in which delegates will present papers to each other and engage in critical discussion. So, your correspondent will limit himself (really this time) to a few comments about the two shows he caught today. One of these, The Swallows of Fatherland, was a biting satire with its false teeth removed, and the other To Touch the Moon, a blending of drama and choreography that felt like a soap opera on stage - some severely restricted comments on the latter below.

The Swallows of Fatherland

Oh, the pains of the 'country town'. All who grew up in rural areas know it well - the gossip, the xenophobia, the horrible, horrible restrictions placed on each other. The painful consensus, tragically miscalculated at times, painfully real at others, sometimes simply naively brilliant. It's a rich source of satire, not only because it is so laughable to an elitist, cultured, urban perspective to which theatre normally panders, but because it shows the perspective of the accusers for what it really is - not necessarily more or less legitimate.

The Swallows of Fatherland has a perfect satirical premise (although it's referred to as farce in the publicity material) - the drama club of a rural Estonian town stage a play about the War of Independence, to celebrate the 100 year anniversary. There's just one 'problem': they're all women! (Cue laughter). Some colleagues stayed away based on this premise, but I bravely soldiered on, and as I stepped into the rural-town-hall surrounds of Tartu's Student Club, I expected a connection to the most cringe-worthy aspects of my rural Australian upbringing.

Photo:Slim Vahur

In this sense, I was not disappointed. The play, written by Estonian favourite Andrus Kivirähk, is a sharp observation of Estonian small-town life. Starting with a few miserable, plonky, piano chords, aged member of the Northern Lights Drama club, Anu (devilish Ester Pajusoo), wanders onto stage, sitting down to knit. In comes Merike (Marta Laan), in a fit of rage, and launches into a detailed diatribe about how the toilet is broken again, and when will it be truly fixed, and if that bloody mayor would only do his job rather than lining his pockets in Greece etc. All lines of argument which are painfully familiar. As Sveta (Maria Klenskaja) enters, the discussion turns to the correct or incorrect attire for saunas (which Estonians are quite interested in, I'm told), and who is the correct sort of actor to play the lead in Madam Butterfly. The scene is set for the group's writer/director Pilvi (Ülle Kaljuste) to enter and proclaim that she has written their new play about the war of independence, and they won't be able to play in it - to much protests ("I could play a young man! I've even played a rabbit, and they're much smaller"). It becomes a game of trying to get the village men to participate, and when Toivo (Taavi Teplenkov) finally comes to fix the toilet, he's the first victim to this desperate circle of biddies.

DRAAMA Festival Day 4: Apartment Building Floods

Ah, that familiar feeling when you are behind on the writing. As shows accumulate, waiting to be written about, time marches on, and new shows inevitably begin. And so on, and so on, proceeding - as Kafka might say - into deepest darkness.

Nevertheless, here I sit on Day 4, with just a lazy single show to write about today, the enchanting Before Us, The Deluge. The extended chaos of yesterday's Hippie Revolution was just too much for me - I appreciated the intent to innovate on a level of dramaturgical confusion, putting as many fight scenes, 70s songs, and unexplained events into a single 2-hour period as possible, but my brain just wasn't up to it. Maybe I am not cut out to be a flower child, after all.

Meanwhile, our hosts in Tartu tick along. The city is slowly unraveling itself to me - from its initial appearance as a lump of concrete in the form of H&M, Subway, and other shopping extravaganzas that plague the centre of Europe's cities, I have been quietly discovering some of the more secret facets - not without the help of friends and strangers alike. The wooden houses are a particular feature - originally built to house workers, today they stand as relatively energy-inefficient relics of Estonia's past (though possibly also pointing to the future, today Estonia is apparently the largest exporter of wooden houses in the EU).

Before Us, The Deluge

As well as his neoliberalising and imperialist military instincts, Ronald Regan was also known for having a comedic disposition, especially in relation to the Societ Union. One joke he tells features in Before Us, The Deluge. After some introductory notes that these are jokes told by people within the Soviet Union, who "have a great sense of humour but are very cynical about their systems", Regan relates that a man is putting down a deposit for a car, and being told to return for it in 10 years. "Morning, or afternoon?" The man asks. "What difference does it make?" the seller replies. The man says "Well, the plumber is coming in the afternoon".

"Ha. Ha. Ha." comes the slow, sarcastic reply from Anti Kobin, one third of the protagonists of Before Us, The Deluge - a sickly-sweet and darkly comic look at that microcosm of Soviet life: the apartment building. The stories centre around a particular apartment block, in Õismäe, a suburb of Tallinn, where tenants live out their tiny dramas on a never-changing landscape of malfunctioning amenities, apartment shifting, and tragicomedic incidents (incidentally, if you ever wanted an example of the astonishing urban planning projects of the Soviet Union, an image search of Õismäe is a good place to start). Here, artists trade apartments for a better view but no hot water, young girls imagine Swan lake is being sung to them by the radiator, and punk bands rehearse to the tune of noise complaints.

Photo: Siim Vahur

Before Us, The Deluge holds a mirror up to these events, using the apartment building as a metaphor for Estonian life in the 1980s. The stories of three protagonists are related in all their tragicomic detail. Anti Kobin begins, telling of his artist parents and their incompatibilities with Soviet life, trying to move their grand piano without the help of a maintenance lift, rendered faulty through its miscommunication of Russian and Finnish parts, and the fact that the Russian parts "weren't made for elevators anyway". Liivika Hanstin takes over with her narrative of trying to become a ballerina, having seen a production of Swan Lake on a Finnish TV station. Finally, Mihkel Tikerpalu provides an account of his ascent to punk status, joining the others in putting safety pins in their ears and rehearsing in their apartments, much to the chagrin of neighbours.

DRAAMA Festival Day 3: Back to where it all began

Day 3 was a heavy day. For one thing, the clouds hang over Tartu as though at any moment they might revolt from their summer codes of conduct and disturb the peace. There's a kind of hesitant energy, as well, with the university semester having begun but not yet in the full swing. Tartu is most famous as a university town - along with Saint Petersburg and Berlin, once forming part of a coalition of highest-quality learning institutions. Today, it's still one of the few in the Baltic universities to offer English-language degrees (no Russian, apparently).

Day 3 saw two heavy shows, the first - The Mistress of the Raven's Stone - is a new play that is so classical it made me think it was written in the 1850s, about events in 1950s Estonia. The second, dealing with the 1960s, is an opera called Estonian History: A Nation born of Shock,  and tells the story of Estonia from its beginnings, apparently with the meteor/meteorite Kaali in about 1500 BC. Both shows are part of the 'Tale of the Century' series, which make up a majority of the English language programming. Apologies to the honest work from the artists behind the late-night Cabaret Siberia - a dark cabaret that stylistically throws back to the traditions of the form. My Estonian language is just not good enough yet.

The Mistress of the Raven's Stone

'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' is an idiom that applies in certain, mainly conservative theatre contexts. Why stray far from the dependable structures of Ibsen and Chekhov? They were the masters of the craft, the unassailable geniuses - right? We should just be making theatre that works, for god's sake, not all of this experimentation!

Not only is such a sentiment totally against the ethos of this writing platform, including the principles for theatre art as an entire practice, and the entire reason for making theatre in the first place - it's also bound to kill the art form itself, which is hindered, and not helped, by lack of experimentation. Thereby, as a general rule, I am unlikely to support something which engages in only storytelling, and makes no attempt to advance the craft.

Still, I can appreciate when something is 'good', in the way that I don't like - I don't like, let's say diamonds, but I am totally willing to put principle aside for a moment, and admire a well-constructed one. And The Mistress of the Raven's Stone is a good play. Everything in it works - from the drawing room set, to the typecasting, to the moments of phantasm. The plot, centred around 1950s Estonia and the testing occupation of the Soviet Union, functions perfectly, characters coming in to advance the plot, making sudden revelations that totally change the previous assumptions, burying historical detail and nostalgia flawlessly inside speech. There are turning points in the appropriate places, a cliffhanger introduction of a new character at the end of the fist act (no less than a Bogeyman!) and a quasi-political discussion about social obligations under an oppressive regime. All the ingredients are there, tastefully arranged.

Foto: Siim Vahur

Ilse (Lauli Otsar) dreams of the times before the Soviet Union, where you could get proper toothpaste, material for sewing wedding dresses, and dish recipes. Their collective farm has fallen on hard times, with not enough labourers left to grow potatoes. It's left to her fiancée Heino (Markus Habakukk) to remind her of the benefits of the Soviet project, including hydroelectric plants, trolly-buses, and apartments - "These kind of memories only get in the way". Enter the local lieutenant Eduard (Märt Avandi) to check on them, explaining during a man-off with Heino that "Sitting by the stove and criticising the authorities is easy". As he leaves, we first experience the wondrous powers of the Ravenstone, a mysterious artifact left to Ilse by her father (deported by Eduard, for which he is deeply sorry) which apparently has the power to commit small supernatural acts, such as preventing Eduard from finding the door to exit. Aunt Berta (Piret Rauk) comes in to offer practical wisdom ("Sometimes it's good that there are some things in the world we can't change") and the local mayor Harald (Ago Anderson) drops in to ask Ilse to paint a portrait of Stalin, and to borrow the Ravenstone to save the harvest. Act 1 closes with the sudden arrival of a wounded Bogeyman (Lauri Kink, doing that role where you wait the entire first act for your big reveal, then take a break for interval), providing the cliffhanger moment spurring the second act.