30.09.2024

Arni Rajamäki

Shaking it up: on toppling traditions  
Playwright and director Arni Rajamäki first emerged onto the Finnish theatre scene with their final degree project titled Beginning Middle End. The artist has characterised it as an anarchic spoken performance. In this interview, they explain the effect a conscious ethos of remaining in-progress can have on the artistic process as a whole. Rajamäki’s practice exposes Finnish theatrical rules and conventions to exacting scrutiny, while experimenting with setting the dramatic text free from the physical presence of the actor. 
 
Playwright and director Arni Rajamäki first emerged onto the Finnish theatre scene with their final degree project titled Beginning Middle End. Their no-holds-barred drama is less a play and more a manifesto homing in on all that is SHIT and boring about theatre, namely all the STRAIGHTS. In October this year, Rajamäki’s work was recognised with the inaugural Origo prize, presented by the Writers Guild of Finland to an early-career playwright. 
 
The work, which the artist describes as an anarchistic spoken performance, is already available in Swedish and Danish, with an English translation in the pipeline too. A production of Beginning Middle End directed by the writer themself has enjoyed a four-year run on the Finnish theatre circuit and also appeared at a number of theatre festivals.  
 
My rather grandiose mission is to make drama as a form exciting, give it some appeal. What I’m trying to do is write plays that are fun and take you by surprise. And I want to challenge our current ideas around what a play can be. My hope is that, through my writing, I can make plays interesting and also have some impact on how people think about them as a text type. The question I’m asking is, do plays still matter in this present moment, and what can we use them to express?” Arni Rajamäki says. 
 
 

Beginning: Now, how am I gonna put this without offending anyone... 

Beginning Middle End first began life as Arni Rajamäki’s final project for their degree in dramaturgy and playwriting at Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy. In response to the stress and the pressure they felt to deliver, they decided to turn the situation on its head.  
 
I started thinking about what would happen if I, like, really messed up or went and broke some unspoken rule. So then I started producing material without trying to force it into the mould of a ‘proper’ play, completely dispensed with any self-censorship and any kind of anxiety about looking stupid. And as I did that, these themes around theatrical conventions and traditions started to appear, and I started asking questions about which of them didn’t feel relevant to me and why.” 
 
Rajamäki envies writers who find writing easy. For Rajamäki, writing is something they have to force themself to do. The writing of Beginning Middle End was an exercise in lowering the barrier to writing and finding ways to write with greater ease. 
 
Learning how to do that really shaped the play. It became this amorphous lump, a monster really, in the genre of ‘bad’ or maybe ‘unpolished’. The thing about trying to create something bad is that it takes a surprising amount of effort. You can’t just spew stuff out indiscriminately. There are spelling errors in the play that I’ve literally spent hours thinking about.” 
 
The conventional way of doing things on stage, Rajamäki says, is all about moderation, both in terms of content and form. 
 
Beginning Middle End has been shaped by the way we talk about things in Finland. The tone of our public discourse was something I paid really close attention to while writing the play four years ago. People can be so unreasonable and irrationally hateful in the way they respond to the opinions of others – and that’s not to say that I’m defending the opinions themselves. In my play, I’ve tried to explore what that might mean for drama as a form of ‘high culture’.” 
 
Unsurprisingly, Beginning Middle End contains a generous helping of unreasonable opinions. The character delivering the monologue takes ruthless aim not only at theatrical conventions but also heterosexuals who always get to be the hero. The play’s nameless protagonist restarts their speech over and over again, at great pains to couch their views on theatre in proper, palatable, terms. Each time they fail, going from 0 to 100 within just a few lines. By the end, all they can manage is a torrent of invective and clusters of furious consonants. 
 
 

Middle: THEATRE IS A PILE OF SHIT!! 

Rajamäki directed the play’s debut outing which took the form of a series of unrehearsed readings. Every night, a different actor was invited to engage with the text on stage. Their immediate responses were then shared with the audience. The text was also projected for the audience to see, its typographic playfulness supporting the actor’s interpretive process and tickling the audience’s funny bone, the fonts fluctuating in tandem with the monologuer’s emotional state. 
 
As I was writing the text, I thought a lot about who might perform it. It felt wrong for it to be a specific person with their own bodily history. I wanted the script to have this sense of anonymity to it and a sort of fleshlessness. It was through these sorts of thoughts that the idea of making the text itself visible to the audience came about.” 
 
Though Rajamäki ultimately went for an unrehearsed reading, they did also consider the option of using a choir to interpret the text. The concept of an unrehearsed, first-sight reading was familiar to the playwright through Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit currently running in London. Another source of inspiration was the prima vista, the practice, in music, of a performer reading and playing music they have not seen before. 
 
According to the playwright, working within a permanent state of in-progress allowed them to consider the staging of the work in its widest sense. Together with their creative team, Rajamäki considered how this ethos could be made visible on stage, including through the set and the acting.  
 
We were all really focused on issues around representation while we worked on this. We considered things like how to represent trans bodies on stage, for example. At first, I tried to find just a single performer to deliver the monologue, but I realised pretty quickly that what really interested me in this play was preserving the autonomy of the script on stage. I wanted to challenge and investigate this expectation that the actor is always at the centre of it all. By using different actors, we’re shifting the focus away from the physical presence of a single performer and onto the relationship between the performer and the text and also investigating the sort of power dynamics that come into play during the casting process.” 
 
Although the text is intended to be what the playwright terms “fleshless”, every actor and every venue bring their own interesting subtext to the performance. Earlier this year, Beginning Middle End ran at Helsinki City Theatre, where it was performed by the theatre’s artistic director, among many others. A new twist was added to the play’s critique of the theatrical establishment here, given the profile and status of the theatre in question. 
 
 

End: AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRFGGGGGGG 

If you’re an artist, right, do you always have to confront your impostor syndrome first before you can do anything else? 
 
WHY DON’T YOU CONFRONT YOUR OWN STUPIDITY, EH 
 
the problem is, I can’t actually think of anything else to confront tbh 
 
 
 
Beginning Middle End first appeared on stage in January 2021. Due to the Covid restrictions in place at the time, the audience comprised just four people, all teachers at the Theatre Academy and all there to evaluate the final project. 
 
It was a weird experience. They all sat in complete silence, and the whole thing felt very serious. All our subsequent performances have been these massively raucous affairs, and the audiences have been so responsive.” 
 
Rajamäki says it’s been fascinating to see how the work responds to different contexts. 
 
It’s important for me to be really aware of who’s in the audience and where the performance is happening. As I was working on my final project, I had a Theatre Academy audience in mind. That’s a very particular setting and a very particular set of people. There’s this smug sense of collective pride there about getting a place and being chosen. I wanted to disrupt that. In the end, Beginning Middle End never had any kind of run at the Theatre Academy at all. I’m really surprised at how well it’s worked in other contexts." 
 
Rajamäki says they enjoyed the play’s outing at the Pink Pavilion festival in Denmark. The translated extract was created with a single actor in mind.  
 
For the translated productions I’ve provided a version of the play that doesn’t involve the prima vista method. The way I see it is that the unrehearsed readings are my thing and not an integral feature of the script itself.” 
 
 

Let’s talk about Richard 

Arni Rajamäki is currently working on Let’s Talk About Richard, a new drama that played as an in-progress work earlier this spring to a jam-packed audience at the Finnish National Theatre’s “cafe stage”. Though it charts the life of French pianist Richard Clayderman, it is not a biopic. Its protagonists are three concertgoers with front row seats who have come to hate watch, and hate listen to, the pianist. The work explores class and taste and, in many ways, picks up where Beginning Middle End left off. 
 
What I’m interested in, first and foremost, is art. It’s my area of expertise, so it makes sense for me to write about it. I’ve studied art history and spent a lot of time thinking about how I can incorporate it into my writing.  
 
Richard Clayderman was an aspiring classical pianist but had to give it up because he couldn’t afford to pursue it. He went on to become a famous musical entertainer instead. His story is so relevant, because it begs the question of who can become an artist. Also; what kind of people are drawn to his brand of music and who feels able to attend his performances? So the play is also about class: what does art, and the way we consume it, tell us about our place in society?” 
 
The staged reading at the National Theatre made a huge difference to the writing process, Rajamäki says. 
 
It’s rare for a script that’s still in development to be given a space and an audience. It’s really hard to get any real feel for what people liked or didn’t like. But what I came away with was this sense of what the play felt like within that physical setting. It’s the kind of feedback that you’re always desperate for when you’re writing, so I’m all set now.” 
 
Rajamäki says they will be putting the finishing touches to the script this autumn, with a stage premiere to follow in 2026 at the latest. After the staged reading drew a diverse audience to the National Theatre, it will be interesting to see who comes to see the finished product. 
 
I’ve been told that one audience member came to see the staged reading because they wanted to see a drama about their hero, Richard Clayderman. That was just so wonderful and completely unexpected. I’d love to know what they made of the play. And I wonder if they realised it wasn’t exactly going to be a puff piece.”  
 
Rajamäki says they are not yet sure whether they will direct the first production of the play themself, but that has no bearing on the writing process.  
 
As far as I’m concerned, the script is its own thing, and how others interpret it is not for me to say. With Beginning Middle End, I kept the writing and the directing completely separate. Right now, my aim is to focus totally on only the writing – that’s the ideal that I strive towards – but of course my mind is on how things will work on stage too. With Let’s Talk About Richard I’ve already incorporated more performance-specific elements into the text itself.” 
 
Is the playwright’s plan to continue exploring the meta dimension? 
 
Absolutely,” Rajamäki says. “I mean it would be great fun to do a chamber play some time, totally by the book, or a really tightly written drama with no experimental features whatsoever. But at the moment it feels like all my ideas tend to be more preoccupied with form. I wish theatres were a bit braver with their programming,” they add by way of a parting shot, “it feels like they’re scared people will instantly die of boredom if they’re exposed to something they don’t immediately understand.” 
 
 
Leena Kärkkäinen 
 
Leena Kärkkäinen is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Theatre Studies at Helsinki University. Alongside her studies, she works as Communications Coordinator at the Writers’ Guild of Finland. Kärkkäinen also contributes articles and theatre reviews to a number of publications, including T-efekti, an online magazine aiming to bring theatre studies to a wider audience. 
 

 

Translation by Liisa Muinonen-Martin
Author photo by Myrsky

 


Arni Rajamäki is introduced in the New Plays from Finland database

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