Flagrant self-promotion

Need I say more? I hope this helps us sell out tonight's show.

Today's fleeting thoughts and impressions

When spring rain falls on the dusty tarmac streets of this city, the city of my birth, a very particular smell is released. I can't compare it to anything - it is both dusty and fresh, not at all unpleasant. It triggers memories in me older than words. It proves, in a way, that I am indeed in the city of my birth - these are the streets I have learned to walk on, inhaling this smell.

I went to pick up a parcel from the post office local to my home (from which I am a plumbing-renovations exile until the autumn). Sent from the other side of the planet, I knew the parcel contained photographs from my childhood and that of my teenage sons. The weight of the parcel on my hip felt a little like carrying a baby, but also I felt I was carrying mad sad Solange, the unloved-till-breaking-point theatrical character I am currently playing. Three more shows as Solange, then I, too, shall leave her. Sorry Solange... It is strange how the characters one plays become real, at once part of oneself, and another person intimately known, and yet all of it is illusion.

While I walked, I got a sudden urge to listen to my scarcely-used iPod. I played my friend Rebecca's song on repeat, over and over again. It is beautiful - I remember when she played it to me for the first time, I knew she was a singer-songwriter but I had no idea of how shockingly talented she was. It completely blew me away then, and still does. Dear Reader, these are your instructions - go and listen to her singing "Isadora's Alice Party" - the other songs are good too, but Isadora is very special. Listen to it and imagine the scent of the spring rain.

Busy weekend

It's wish me breakaleg time. We are on tomorrow with The Maids, finally.

The photo is one of fabulous hannamime's, showing the stage set for us. Picture me kneeling upstage, pawing through Madame's wardrobe (=pile of clothes on the floor) with love and hate and envy and lust and passion. Even trying on The Red Velvet Dress. That's how we open.

Luckily we are opening on a matinee, because in the evening, it's time for the Eurovision song contest, brought to the kitsch-loving public of the world (well, Europe) from my very own Helsinki. I hope we get a table in the pub after the show - not for the drinking, but for the rowdy dorkiness of it all. For those of you who care about such things, my friend Arabella is working behind the scenes of the kitsch-fest, and has some really rather juicy photos you won't see anywhere else but on her Flickr site...

(I know, I know, this post is pure trousers. But what can I do. I need to rest the brain for tomorrow.)

The time has come to unleash the maids - another non-commercial commercial break

So here they are: Claire, Madame, Solange. Taken by the esteemed keltanen, a press photo for The Maids. Again, if you are lucky and privileged enough to have the opportunity, we would feel most lucky and privileged if you'd come and see us (me) acting very dangerously and in the fashion of homicidal maniacs.

Please note I have specially painted, with my actor's make-up kit (well, the group's, really) the horrendous bags around my eyes as well as heightened the very faint lines that naturally occur around my mouth. I do NOT look this bad in real life, I don't. Or this homicidal.

One more thing: a non-commercial commercial break

If you are (lucky and privileged enough to be) in the Greater Helsinki area, go and see Here Speaks Elektra, Theatre Naamio ja Höyhen's current production. I did, last night, and am still lost for words. It is good. For stunning visuals of the production and the process that lead up to it, see happeningfishes or keltanen's flickr sites. Above image is one of keltanen's - sorry man, I don't know why your site doesn't allow for direct linking to it?

Love, hate, murder, & rubber gloves: in a word, theatre.

It is a well-known, oft-quoted cliché that actors like doing baddies, that the roles are somehow meatier. This may be so - I haven't really been cast as one before, although I have done my fair share of unhappily-married middle-aged women (oppressed and not). They have been great roles too. I confess, however, to having had a bit of a hankering for trying my hand, as it were, at someone really mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Well, careful what you wish for, missus. I am Solange in Jean Genet's The Maids. I'll attempt to give a quick synopsis of the storyline: two middle-aged sisters, Solange and Claire, are housemaids to a young and beautiful Madame. Their love for each other is twisted and peculiar in a number of ways, and apart from it, the only content of their lives is Madame, they love and envy her with all the unspent passion of womanhood. They spend their time acting out a fantasy of turning against Madame, of humiliating and ultimately killing her, taking turns at being Madame, the other sister then playing the one "cast" as Madame. (Confused? You won't be, if you come and see it. Or perhaps you still will be.) Arguably, Genet has written the maids as the protagonists, but they - particularly Solange - are scary and murderous. I am not quite off-book yet, so might miss one or two, but offhand I can recall four incidents of Solange either attempting to strangle someone onstage, or speaking of attempting it, or claiming to have finally done it, in the hour-long play. Genet's play is based on a true story (I have linked to a related site in a previous post, but please don't read if you are easily or even medium-easily upset by violence) although it is only a foundation he's built upon, something that has rattled his intelligence in possibly the way the true story Equus is based on did to Shaeffer. I wish, in some ways, that I hadn't read up on the background case .

A couple of my good friends have spoken about the horror of doing a "bad" character - one did the Scottish Laird in the well-known Shakespeare play that carries his name, the other the incestuous Stepfather in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (in which I, incidentally, was the oppressed unhappy elderly crippled wife). I haven't understood why they've felt it so heavy, not really (I mean, the roles are brilliant, so why not enjoy?), but I'm getting an inkling of it now. I am only a self-taught actor so won't pretend to know all the names of Stanislavskian techniques etc, but I go into the process of creating a character with the idea that all of us carry everything inside of us, every human possibility and emotion, and that "all" you need to do is to just tap into it. Which is scary when you start to feel you've a half-developed Solange inside you, that it could be you, under some circumstances -

And yet Solange is sad. Sad beyond belief. And at yesterday's rehearsal I suddenly felt that she was really doing this, she was going to murder Madame not only because she couldn't bear the oppression - in particular of her sister - anymore, but also because she couldn't allow her sister to commit the murder herself. She was - is - doing it out of love.

So - the box in the picture contains some rehearsal props and some actual bits of costume. Visible are e.g. the alarm clock that will warn the sisters, mid-strangulation, of Madame's return, the teapot for the poisoned tea, and Solange's rubber gloves.

Coming Too Close to God, or How Art Knows the Meaning of Life. My attempt at explaining.

Tonight, I saw my second butoh show, Jyu Ningen Zu. I cried AGAIN. I cannot begin to describe the show, just details of

how the shadow of her hand momentarily looked like the shadow of a toothed snake, or a dragon, on the talcum powder in the bowl on stage,
how their footprints were black in the spilled powder and white on the black rubber mat of the theatre floor, creating a pattern that seemed to mirror the Japanese character painted onto the backdrop,
how suddenly we saw a headless woman dancing,
how his Oriental face seemed to simultaneously be that of a newborn, and an ancient, and an extraterrestrial, and the face of mankind condensed into one face,
how the powder bowl left a perfect blank in the spilled powder, like a black hole, like a negative sun, and how, incredibly, he managed to leave a footprint in it later

and impressions of
bodies talking and saying the unsayable things,
beautiful ugliness,
expanding the mind like lsd or Tarkovsky, as in "let's look at this bit of lichen floating in this puddle for a few minutes or aeons until we really see it and understand the meaning of everything",
leaving me afterwards needing to run home and hide
because

everything:
shop windows with hat shop dummies wearing fur hats which I hate, Nike trainers in glass display cases
the city of my birth, in its full between-seasons ugliness
bus indicator lights, on-off, on-off
the digital clockface on the side of a building (20:41, +1 C)
the names of shops (TIMBER HEART. NEW LOOK.)
suddenly wears a face of indescribable beauty and meaning, benign and terrible

and because

I am wearing God on my non-believer face and the passers-by will see Him, or I will see Him in their eyes

and because

my too-open soul cannot take any more seeing, no, no, don't show me any more, I can't take it, it's all too beautiful

Beware, I'm going theatrical again

We started rehearsing our spring production yesterday, Jean Genet's Maids (I am Solange). The play is based on a true story - two pious little maids went berserk in France in the 1930s, and got rid of their employers in a fairly graphic manner. Given my habit of in-character face-pulling actions when reading/going over my lines in public, I hate to think what this'll make me look like. Glad I won't have to sit next to me on the bus this Spring. (If you do follow that link, be warned, it's really rather harrowing.)

Afterwards saw Ville Valo in the pub. I nearly asked him for his autograph (for my son, I hasten to add - I know about his handshake, remember!) but then bottled out. An endearing side to Finland is how our big celebs and politicians actually drink & shop with us plebs. Of the four presidents we've had in my lifetime (one was in forever, hence so few) I have seen three amongst his/her subjects, pretty much casually minding their own business. I once saw the current pres Halonen shopping at my local grocery shop, with one female minder only. Apparently Halonen also goes to the same belly-dance lessons as my friend Arabella.

Letting go of theatrical roles

I know it is a poncy thing to say - "letting go of a role". I also know I have found myself, more than once, during (and after!) more than one production, thinking about my lines in a public place with such concentrated intensity I have suddenly realised I was also doing the related facial expressions, hand gestures, etc. Which does tend to make other people on the bus think you're someone to avoid.

Yesterday, I had dinner with my parents' oldest friends, a lovely couple. Amongst other things, they told us about the 100th birthday party of his mother. She had been an actress in her youth, by my count sometime in the mid-to-late 1920s, until she married and her husband forbade her to go onstage. In many ways, she is in outstandingly sharp condition for her age - although she has been insisting for a few years her oldest son (my parents' friend) is in fact her long-dead brother, she could still dance with him at the party. At some point during the celebrations, however, she threw up her arms, contorted in apparent mental distress, and called out "Antakaa minun elää! Antakaa minun elää!" ("Let me live! Let me live!"). This was, understandably, very startling for her son and his wife.They began to convince her they were not about to harm her, until the penny dropped: she was reciting lines from Elinan surma, a traditional Finnish epic-poem-come-theatre-piece, about a young wife who gets burned alive by her jealous husband. She must've just been thinking about her lines, 80 years on.

Still too exhausted to talk

but a picture tells a thousand words, so for a tale of our Winter's Tale, look no further than Arabella's flickr set of the whole shebang - backstage, onstage, all over the place. You might also want to check Charnel Doze's shots, which mainly focus on her fabulous costuming. Faaaab piccies, ladies.

All I have on my flickr is a handful of sillies, mainly from the final post-production pub sess. I realised I wanted to focus on *being* at the fantastic venue that Aleksanterin teatteri is, rather than even attempt to capture it on my camera which really doesn't even have the functions necessary for the said attempt...

And the rest is silence

...which, of course, isn't a line from our show, which is now done and dusted, been and gone, born and forever lost (sob). I cannot begin to comment or tell the (winter's, ha!) tale or anything similar yet, I am just too stunned. This is not uncommon with our shows - for financial/practical/circumstancial reasons, we have to make do with very short production periods. A mad rush of 60 hours - from get-in (set is not built, lights are not set, and you've never set foot on the particular stage yet in your life) to the final bow after three shows in two days, striking the set&getting out - leaves you with a deep feeling of "what happened?", combined with post-production blues ("life seems so meaningless now I've got my spare time back"). Johanna the (other) director saw The Ghost on row three or four (the theatre is the old National Opera, built 1879, so a Phantom is surely in order), when she went to sing onstage while the theatre was still dark. He was short, dark, with close-cropped hair, and vanished when he was sure he'd been seen. She welcomed him to our show. I ran onstage to call him back when Johanna told me, but he wouldn't show himself to me. Johanna said he only comes if you feed him. He could've had all of me...

FAO my fellow fans of spam poetry

Something I found on Ishbadiddle. Is it just me, or do these things have great dramatic performance potential?

This particularly FAO my fellow Players

but also for anyone else who digs this sort of stuff: a tag cloud of the most frequently-used words in Hamlet. Very, very interesting...

I dream in iambic pentameter

We have rehearsed for twelve hours over the past weekend. The show is coming along nicely (and so it should, we are on stage next weekend!) but the pace hasn't left much time for blogging or indeed anything else. Prithee, gentle reader! Thou shalt go to Arabella's flickr site and there, in particular, to the "Dress Rehearsal" set, to see what it was like yesterday - the girl takes a great photo, methinks. If thou art in town, thou shalt then purchase thyself a ticket for next weekend.

*End of non-commercial commercial break*

I cut my baby's hair

Harshly, I must add, and lots of it. It is, after all, only a Steiner doll, acting the part of baby Perdita in our production. It makes me feel only a little better. I also bashed her hard against the floor, because I felt people weren't serious enough about what was being talked about onstage - and now I feel dreadfully guilty, not only for my Steiner doll but also as I don't want my fellow actors to think I am/was criticising their performances. I wasn't. I am not. I just talk too much, is all.

More shameless commercialism

Yesterday's poster run ended, unsurprisingly, at That Pub. Production date is getting closer. I am getting more nervous. All is as it should be.

Butoh saved my day

Last night, straight after seeing the shocking news about Anna Politkovskaja, I went to see my friend's theatre group Naamio & Höyhen (Mask & Feather) perform Hana to Shi - Kukka ja kuolema (Flowers & Death), a Japanese butoh show. Do click on the link and follow up with clicking "pressikuvat", press photos. You won't regret it. I knew just about nothing whatsoever about butoh so didn't know what to expect, and ended up feeling I'd seen every story ever told, in less than an hour: cavalcades of people from throughout the history of man, distorted, suffering, elated, in love, dying, ugly, beautiful, going through every human emotion, heightened and expressed physically. I am quite, quite blown away. They had a great review in Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest daily, which is no mean feat for an independent fringe theatre group. They deserved it wholly. Go see it if you're in town. I cried afterwards.

I've met famous people

I met Kathy Acker once, she gave a talk in a lecture room in the Helsinki University. She was already very ill, and had this fragile feel about her. She was clearly a little uncomfortable about the formal setting of the talk, and I suppose the Finnish crowd though quite big and certainly interested, was, in true Kaurismäkiän way, rather silent. I shook her hand afterwards and said, in the undying words of a true poet, "I really like your work."

I met Prince Edward too, at a function at the British Embassy, when His Highness was visiting Helsinki on a "promoting youth activity" trip. I was 34 and was invited, formally, as a representative of the theatrical ex-pat community. They probably didn't notice I was an ex-ex-pat, having returned to the country of my origin, and not a Brit abroad at all. We were coming into production with Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends at the time, and I said to the prince, "Too bad you're not here next week, Your Highness, you could've come to see our show." And blushed. Deary, deary me.

© 2006 Anna MR