Dramatist and director Joakim Groth

Historical drama and Godot

BY TOMAS JANSSON

Joakim Groth has dominated Swedish-language theatre in Finland as a director and dramatist during a period when new Swedish-language drama in Finland has held low priority and Swedish-speaking Finnish directors have been in short supply.

That may sound as if it were easy to gain a key position in such a climate. However, since Swedish-speaking Finland has lacked a tradition of dramatist/directors -- a double role that is strong in Finnish-language theatre in Finland -- Groth has actually held a position that does not really exist. In Swedish-speaking Finland, the writing of drama, directing and the position of theatre manager have been handled to an unusual degree by actors, and the explanation for this may lie in the fact that in Finland, theatre training is only available in Swedish for actors. Dramaturgists and directors are trained in Finnish only.

Joakim Groth does not have any actual training in the theatre. He was going to be a writer -- and he still is, he sometimes says -- so he studied literature, published a collection of poetry (1979) and a novel (1981), and it was not until director Anette Arlander asked him to write a play that Groth tried his hand at drama.

His first play, Skotten i Helsingfors ( The shots in Helsinki , 1983), is set in three different time periods in three rooms and in three acts all of which end in death. His next play, Främlingarna (The strangers) , comes four years later and Groth begins to realize that drama suits him better than prose: "The very first time I wrote drama, I realized that it was natural and easy for me to think in terms of situations and lines and subtext."

Successful debut

His breakthrough as a dramatist was still some way off, however, and the novel Världen enligt Edi ( The world according to Edi , 1987) remains Groth's most recent work of fiction to date. His breakthrough comes first in the capacity of director.

When his younger brother Marcus asked him to be the director of Marcus's diploma production at the Theatre Academy (1985), that was the birth of both a production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot and a new theatre group, Teater Mars, which according to Groth in an interview that year was founded in order to create some freedom of choice in relation to both projects and working partners.

The production of Waiting for Godot was elected theatre event of the year, a success which Groth attributed twenty years later to a couple of simple but effective ideas: "We turned the servant, Lucky, into a computer that Pozzo is dependent on; we made the tramps into young men; we turned Godot into a game that starts because one of the tramps says 'Gå då!' (Swedish for 'Go, then!', sounds like Godot). Also, the fact that the actors had such incredible energy and the will to take on the whole world."

As a director, Groth rapidly established himself, and his rehearsals became something of a trademark: a process influenced by Gestalt therapy which involved the actors deeply. His touch is meticulous and recognizable, but the process itself is easy-going. His directorial work exists in a post-modern tradition, with a collage-like approach and a view that puts the way that the story is told on a par with the story itself.

"I discovered my directing style early on," Groth explains, "and it was deeply influenced by my experiences with psychodrama and Gestalt therapy, which I knew more about than practical work in the theatre. And although I was very conscious of form to begin with, I have always been drawn both to realism and a type of minimalism: as little force and as few effects as possible."

Breakthrough as dramatist

Groth had to wait another ten years for another success on a par with Godot . In spring 1995, he directed Chechov's Three Sisters , an intimately charged formal experiment in the spirit of Stanislavsky, which was noted as far afield as Sweden, landing Groth directing jobs there.

"I was far more interested in working in Sweden than in working in Finnish in Finland," Groth says today, "After all, I was born in Sweden, and I still had relatives there, but when all is said and done I am a Swedish-speaking Finn and my real context is here."

The same autumn, Groth also experienced his breakthrough as a dramatist, as he realized an old dream of an epic tale in a Swedish-language milieu in Finland. It was a story spanning four decades and several generations, with the eloquent working title Tyrannosaurus Rex .

Now Groth was ready to direct one of his own plays for the first time, and the result was Härlig är jorden (It is a wonderful world). It was a family epic lasting almost four hours, with the traumatic heritage of the Second World War as its starting point, also encompassing the rebellion of the 1960s and reconciliation in the 1980s, and eminently recognizable to the audience through the everyday references that Groth liberally scattered throughout the play. Härlig är jorden was such an enormous success that it was put on at two Finnish-language theatres too, something which is extremely rare for Swedish-language drama in Finland.

Trilogy project

As Swedish-language theatre in Finland enters the new millennium, Groth has worked in almost all theatrical contexts in Swedish-speaking Finland. He has also created several dramatizations of classic novels by Swedish-speaking Finnish writers, single-handedly giving the history of Swedish-language Finland a prominent role on the stage.

Groth admits that this has been something of a calling: "I felt that there were so many texts that should be seen on stage, but I also knew that there was no one else who would do it."

Now he is working on a trilogy of his own at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki. The drama Intermezzo på Johannis ( Intermezzo at Johannis manor , 2002) was set at a manor-house at the time of the February Manifesto in 1899, when Russia tightened its grip on the Grand Duchy of Finland. That first part of the trilogy is written almost shamefully transparently in a Chekhovian spirit, but in Groth's case, that is a homage to Chekhov: "To me he has always been the foremost dramatist, and tragicomedy somehow suits my temperament best."

The second part of the trilogy, En ängel flög förbi ( An angel flew past , scheduled for premiere in February 2004), deals with the time around the civil war which followed Finland's independence, with the conflict between duty and feeling, between what one wants to do and what one feels one has to do. That is a key theme for the entire trilogy, and in fact it is a theme -- in addition to violent and self-inflicted death -- which seems to run throughout Groth's dramas. Even his debut play, Skotten i Helsingfors , centred on an existential situation: how people live within the confines of given circumstances, often without any choice.

The final part of the trilogy will premiere in 2005. It will bring the chronological sequence up to the time where Härlig är jorden started, and then Joakim Groth will have brought almost a hundred years of the history of the Swedish-speaking Finns to the stage.

Tomas Jansson is a cultural editor, YLE/radio Vega, Finland