Even everyday events easily become dramatic, sometimes with life-changing consequences: The guy who was going to be a philosopher overslept and missed the student exam in Finnish. Without a degree, there were no university studies, but it was still possible to apply to the theater college and that's the way it is. Today, Finnish-Swedish Akse Pettersson is one of Finland's most noted directors, and this autumn he will make his first production in Sweden.
"Sisyphus in the living room" premieres at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in October and - as the title suggests - philosophizes freely about the tribulations of everyday life.
- Theater often deals with special permits and disaster permits. Something like this: it was an ordinary life, but then one day this happened and it directs our gaze to that special day. I thought it would be fascinating, within the context of theatre, instead to look at the ordinary and find the special in everyday life.
In reality, there is rarely any spectacular resolution as some drama might lead us to believe. Akse Pettersson talks about false reconciliation.
- There is an expectation that there will be a big ending, that the threads can be tied together or dissolved in a neat way. I think the experience of the world is more ambivalent.
When DN visits the rehearsals, the ensemble files transitions between short scenes that the actors worked on together with the director. Someone drags home grocery bags, someone else hangs laundry and in the middle of it all there is the feeling of dissatisfaction.
- For me, the creation of a work often happens in pieces. You make an observation and think that it could be material for a work. In this case, it is very much about the experience of being at a crossroads.
Akse Pettersson's breakthrough play "Kaspar Hauser" at Q-teatteri in 2014 led to the director being proclaimed the spokesperson for generation Y. It was about lost thirty-year-olds and just over ten years later, the focus is consequently on the forty-plus. Things that earlier in life were about the future and possibilities are replaced in middle age with the realization that this is how it turned out.
When Jonas Gardell in Expressen started this spring's theater debate, he was appalled by the trend of "theatre without a play" and said that there should be "a special circle in hell" for texts that came about through improvisations in workshops with the actors. He mentioned, among other things, "Orosdanser" at the Kulturhuset Stadsteatern and resented the playwright's marginalization. At the same time, the trend of collective theater creation is neither new nor specifically Swedish. The international term for the working method is "devising" and this autumn "Fejk" will also be played at Dramaten, where director Yael Ronen developed the material together with the ensemble.
- I have no need to work in a difficult, strange or different way. There is no end in itself in it. I try to make a performance in a way that I myself understand and take advantage of what is good about making theatre, says Akse Pettersson.
He grew up in Vantaa just outside Helsinki and went to a Swedish-language school, but outside of lessons he mostly spoke Finnish with his friends. During his theater career, he has so far worked almost exclusively in Finnish, even though he basically has Swedish as his mother tongue. Perhaps the linguistic identity has created a certain feeling of exclusion, he believes. Against this background, Akse Pettersson sees the process-based working method as a way to test whether personal ideas and thoughts are universally valid.
- Theatre, or art in general, is very much an interaction between the very specific and the general, the private and the societal. On the one hand, something that is very local may be quite universal, while what is very general may not reach out at all, so it's a difficult balancing act.
Half jokingly, he says that technological inventions have always influenced the way we make theatre. It is about everything from how the printing press made it possible to publish scripts to how today's playwriting is affected by the possibility of copying and pasting text.
- Deciding in advance what people say and in what order they say it is a smart way to do theatre. I have nothing against it. I also work like that. Most of the time there is a script that we follow, but I find that sometimes there are things that are difficult to reach just by writing and that I get there faster if I take a different route.
He describes the transfer from the written word to the theater stage as "a groping for actions, images or meaningful gestures".
- There is a quote by Marguerite Duras that roughly states that a basic prerequisite for writing is to endure loneliness. When I heard that, I thought it was so fascinating, because theater is exactly the opposite: the basic requirement is to tolerate other people, says Akse Pettersson and laughs.
He believes that the theater needs both the actors who can be present in the present and an "external perspective" that thinks about things like narrative and dramaturgy.
- You can place too much or too little importance on the written word. But for me that risk is not of primary importance because I think the risk of losing physicality is also great, as well as the risk of losing musical and rhythmic sensitivity or the tone for societal relevance.
When he asks what is specific to theatre, the essence becomes something other than the story.
- The whole thing about us watching when someone struggles with the fate of being human, that we look at ourselves and that we do it together in a room ties us back to the Greeks and the birth of tragedy. There is something there that is sometimes magical.
