16.12.2013

A talk with Tuomas Timonen, author of Megan’s Story

”You won’t find a single ballerina living in the countryside.” (Ode to Love, 2007)

Tuomas Timonen (b. 1975 in Kuhmo) spent his childhood in the eastern Finnish regions of Kainuu and northern Karelia: receiving vocational training in house-building and attending high school in small towns, working as a classroom assistant at a village school at a time when small primary schools were still tolerated and living in rural areas was an option. His stint as a classroom assistant proved pivotal in terms of his future: he saw a surrealistically costumed, Alfred Jarry-spirited puppet production of Ubu Roi. Theatre can actually be like this? A man of the theatre was born.

Timonen wasn’t daunted from applying for the Theatre Academy Helsinki by the multi-phase entrance examination, but rather by the institution’s public image at the time. Did he have the guts to apply for a school where the teachers are intimidating, as he had read in the newspapers? After gathering his courage, the young Timonen was accepted a student of dramaturgy on his first try, in 1998.

Having long since graduated as dramaturg and lecturer from the theatre academy, Timonen has returned to the regions from whence he hails. ”Bringing the arts to schools and institutions”, a year-long project executed in co-operation with the city of Kajaani, has Timonen working with youth from the area’s children’s homes.  

Portrait of a “heavy” author

At the Theatre Academy Helsinki, Timonen grew interested in experimenting formally and structurally with plays. To him, it felt like the play needed to be developed as an art form – that the narrow-minded focus on entity and integrity needed to be combatted, as he notes in his article ”Hell made play –eli uudesta näytelmästä (The hell-made play – or the new play)” (2011). This process resulted in five plays, which he ended up directing himself, as no one else stepped up to do so.

A dramaturgy student enamoured of the darkest metal music, Timonen rapidly gained a reputation as an author of heavy themes. Timonen doesn’t recognise himself from this description, although he says that a certain amount of blood-splattering and horror effects were characteristic of his work. However, one must dole out such things carefully; he doesn’t care for dreary heaviness. The comparison applies to music as well: what works in rock and pop becomes more cynical, crass, and dull in theatre.

Timonen believes the play is invisible in so-called traditional theatre performances. Yet the problem with experimental writing is that theatre is group endeavour. The rest of the group isn’t necessarily going to carry out someone else’s already-written formal experiment. For Timonen, developing the literary form didn’t ever come to be a meaningful activity, because eliciting responses, even from his own colleagues, was by no means a given.

Nowadays Timonen is commissioned to write plays; the director has already been booked and the artistic team and the season are also already decided. As a playwright, Timonen would like to restore the play to its status as literary work instead of simply performance script. It is the director’s job to think through the play, adapt it for the production at hand, fill any potential ”gaps” and leave any textual material not germane to the performance unused. The literary work can then live on the way the author has written it. At the moment, Timonen is working on a commission, a play based on The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Knowing the exact stage on which it will premiere, Timonen can write the work he wants. But he is very flexible when it comes to the staged execution.

Megan’s Story and (the artist’s) ethics

The artist is automatically considered ethical, notes Timonen. Still, ethical integrity depends greatly on the motives for creating the art. For instance, an author can use another person’s words or deeds as source material. Yet the author must ask himself whether the material has been gathered through eavesdropping, and whether he would like it if someone listened in on his conversations the same way, with ulterior motives.

Indeed, Timonen himself borrowed the true story of a girl named Megan Meier as the basis for his play Megan’s Story. Finland’s largest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, had published a column by a professor on the outdatedness of US criminal law – specifically that the law did not apply to online crimes. At the time, the early 2000s, several cases of online bullying had led to deaths. Just like Megan’s story. In Timonen’s play, 14-year-old Megan commits suicide after being insulted and degraded in online forums.

Timonen believes it is damned hypocritical for an artist to justify his means and material with the argument that he’s ”creating art”. Art can teach us bad behaviour, after all: ”A-ha! That’s another way to be cruel.” Cultural manuscripts can be realised. As if we don’t learn from models! Rarely do people reflect on their actions in practice.

I’m disgusted and infuriated every time I read Megan’s Story. The kick in the gut that comes when it turns that ”Linda”, who has cooked up the bullying scheme, is Megan’s friend Bea’s parent. I analyse my reading experience to Timonen; he is also incapable of fathoming what it is about a teenage girl that could irritate an adult so much that she would lay such a violent trap. To him, the adults and youth in the play engage in communal violence, where the victim is always to blame and where the right to tease the least-confident and marginalised individual is an automatic privilege. When seeking justice, Megan’s parents are turned into criminals; no empathy is shown them.

In his latest article (2012), Timonen writes about the relationship between artisticness and mental illness. He questions, for instance, the theatre student’s need to live in as an unhealthy, draining manner as possible in order to be an artist. A street-credible artist seeks something to say from the frontiers of sanity. 

After Megan, who suffers from low self-esteem, hangs herself, the bully ”Linda” gives a speech at Megan’s funeral: ”(…) we felt like we had lost a daughter and a sister. Megan was Bea’s best friend. But there was a lot more to Megan, Megan was an artist.” The demand to be something extraordinary becomes a bludgeon used to beat the young Megan down.

Sari Havukainen


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Background and source material:

Timonen, Tuomas: ”Hell made play – eli uudesta näytelmästä (The hell-made play – or the new play)”, in Ruuskanen, Annukka (ed.), Nykyteatterikirja. 2000-luvun alun uusi skene (The book of contemporary theatre: the new scene of the early 2000s). Like 2011.
Timonen, Tuomas: Meganin tarina (Megan’s Story), play 2010.
Timonen, Tuomas: Oodi rakkaudelle (Ode to Love), poetry collection. Teos 2007.
Timonen, Tuomas: ”Tarvitseeko taiteilijan olla hullu, (Does an artist need to be crazy?)” in Paula Salminen and Elina Snicker (ed.), Jumalainen näytelmä (The Divine Comedy). Like 2012.