The natural world is vulnerable – that’s the story we need to tell 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is virtually unheard of for a Finnish play to appear in print before its stage debut. 

 

The author Pipsa Lonka has established herself as one of the most important playwrights working in Finland today. In her plays, she returns, again and again, to the question of how nonhuman animals can be represented within theatre. How might we use the literary methods at our disposal to depict humans and other animals on an equal footing, as full subjects in their own right? 

 

Lonka is best known for her plays These Little Town Blues Are Melting Away, Second Nature and sky every day. A two-time winner of Lea, Finland’s most prestigious playwriting award, Lonka has now turned her attention to exploring how a human being’s love for an animal can actually spell its demise. 

 

“​​​​The love we feel for our pets is such a difficult topic to broach, because in doing so you’re undermining this sense we have of ourselves as ‘animal lovers’.” 

 

With her most recent writing project, Lonka says she wanted to pause and reflect upon the existence of a single individual animal. After seeing the documentary The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins (2014), the outline for her new play began to emerge. 

 

“The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins is about a 1960s scientific experiment that involved teaching a dolphin named Peter to communicate in English. He was brought to live with Margaret, one of the research assistants working on the project, in a house that was flooded with water. The documentary shows Margaret’s love of animals, and the genuine fascination she has for dolphins. At the same time there’s this constant sense of tension, because the conditions under which the experiment is run are truly horrific. It was a disturbing viewing experience that really stayed with me for a long time.” 

 

Pipsa Lonka’s new play exists on a thematic continuum with her earlier works. All are an exercise in seeing animals as singular beings. Her Second Nature explores the meat industry, while in sky every day she portrays herd behaviour as exhibited by humans and seagulls, observing them as equals. But although animal characters have clearly featured in her earlier plays, this is the first time that her focus has come to rest squarely on the unique life experiences of an individual animal.  

 

The play takes the form of a direct address, represents a surrender to the act of speaking. Its autotheoretical narrator is engaged in an attempt to understand Peter the dolphin who is caught up in the scientific experiment. They grow exasperated at times, then speechless. The void created by the narrator’s muteness and their lack of access to the experiences of others is filled by the words of well-known artists and academics, Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane and Jaques Derrida among them.  

 

“The quotations appear when the narrator’s own words fail them. They’re like verbal crutches. All language is quotation. Which is to say that language does not equal idiolect; all our expression derives from something else. I felt no need to obscure that. What my text does is point the way towards other writers, towards other possible ways of thinking and speaking. You don’t have to find the words for everything yourself.” 

 

Lonka has previously stated that in depicting nonhuman animals she is deliberately going against the grain of literary tradition and the symbolic role to which animals have been confined within it. She was acutely aware, she says, of the looming presence of Chekov’s The Seagull while she wrote sky every day. This time, she is confronting it head on. 

 

“The primary mind and cognition often rely on this idea of the animal as a symbol for the human, which reduces them to a fable. People use animals to tell stories about themselves. If you were to give in to temptation and told a story about Peter as an individual that loved humans and was himself loved in turn, you’d end up with a fable. The narrator hears people talking about these feelings of love and tenderness but pushes back at them, and that brings this friction to their words. When we narrate the animal from a human perspective, in contrast to ourselves, the exploitative gesture is always present, on some level.” 

 

Any portrayal of suffering endured by another living being will always prompt a reflection on the ethics involved. What matters, Lonka argues, is that we always consider the position we assume in relation to others. Leaving suffering untold is just as problematic as telling it badly, she reminds u​​​​s.   

 

“​     The play will inevitably fail at telling the story of a nonhuman animal. Because we can never fully relate to or connect with that experience. The suffering of an animal brings us to a point of pain and my play attempts to confront that pain without evading the emotions it inevitably evokes. The way we experience an animal’s suffering is determined by the effort we make to understand the conditions under which he lives.” 

 

“In the play, we also see the range of emotions the first-person narrator experiences when confronted with the suffering of another living being and witness their unwillingness and inability to face up to the dark feelings of guilt it evokes in them. The extent of that emotional range is determined by the human experience. At its finest, the text manages to focus on an aspect of the animal’s circumstances, the reality they inhabit, and to find something relevant and relatable within that.” 

 

Peter the dolphin is often depicted through an absence. The only way the narrator can gain access to his fate is through a documentary film that tells his story. It is the same documentary that inspired Pipsa Lonka to write the play. The text engages in dialogue with the work of Derrida and others to address the problems inherent in direct speech. When the narrator realises they are being watched by a fish, they immediately make a connection with Derrida’s musings on being seen by his cat. "I’m staggered at how genuinely hard it is for people to get their head around the fact that we’re constantly being watched and read by the nonhuman animals around us", Lonka says. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Subtly intuitive” is how Lonka describes the rhythm of her writing. While writing Peter lived in a house – a dolphin dot-to-dot she says she was preoccupied with the rhythms of breathing and diving.  

 

“My aim was to create a play that would be like a wave, rolling to the rhythm of diving, the words emerging like an eruption. Dolphins must surface every five to seven minutes to breathe. Another wave-like element within the play is the emotion it contains, the rocking and rolling of the narrator’s inner life. What happens as it rises, falls, stops? As you’re pushed closer, then pulled away? How close can you get, how close dare you go? At the moment of suicide, there are no waves.” 

 

For the publishers TUA the project was about building a stage for Lonka’s play. Graphic designer Aino Nieminen created the expanse of blue that runs along the bottom of every page. For Lonka, this visual element adds an interesting new dimension to the act of reading.  

 

“It’s a potent intervention, but a thoroughly justified one. The layout design adds its own atmosphere to the text, breaking it apart and sending it in new directions. It sweeps the reader into an interpretation vortex, but that’s OK. The really fascinating thing about the liminality of drama as a genre is the proliferation of fields of reading, to the extent that you could not hope to fully engage with all of them,” Lonka says. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elisa Aaltola, a Finnish animal philosopher, and Pipsa Lonka have found inspiration in each other’s approach to the issue of nonhuman animals and have used their discussions to inform their work. We still know very little about how nonhuman animals communicate, Elisa Aaltola points out. René Descartes claimed that, as animals do not speak, they must lack consciousness altogether. He also questioned whether animals could feel pain, given their lack of “rational soul”. Aaltola is also fascinated by Lonka’s exploration of how animals might narrate their own existence and experience. 

 

Peter lived in a house – a dolphin dot-to-dot also invites us to turn our gaze towards ourselves and our sense of how layers of meaning are constituted within language. The play draws a parallel between our tendency to diminish and dismiss nonhuman forms of communication and our inability to appreciate the complexity of our own. We are liable to forget that we, too, engage in primal forms of communication. 

 

Pipsa Lonka continually challenges herself to consider what animal-centred language might look like. As examples she cites onomatopoeia like “miaow” and “neigh”. 

 

“A play can be constituted in language that is grounded not only in material reality but also in the kind of wordless knowledge we’re continually amassing on each other. The question of what animal-centred language might actually look like is a difficult one and answers to it can only be found in a series of mutually complementary suggestions and ideas.” 

 

In Peter lived in a house – a dolphin dot-to-dot, animal-centric language is present in the descriptions of the sounds Peter makes. There are no onomatopoeia for the language of dolphins, in Finnish at least. Lonka points out that it is only relatively recently that we have been able to hear the language of aquatic animals. This might well account, she says, for the lack of onomatopoeia although several exist for horses and cats, for example. 

 

Lonka’s previous play, sky every day, uses the sound of seagulls as transcribed by ornithologists. The sounds were arranged into a typographical display. 

 

“When sky every day was being translated into Danish, we discovered that Danish ornithologists don’t transcribe birdsong into ‘Danish’. We eventually found a short passage of seagull sounds in a bird book that had been translated into Danish and were then able to use that.” 

 

The playwright says she hopes that, with her next play, she will be able to put forward a proposal for what writing in a more animal-centred language might look like. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to academic Elsi Hyttinen, the art and literature of the Enlightenment and Romanticism served to reinforce a narrative of man’s vulnerability in the face of an all-powerful natural world: 

 

“During this period, nature tended to be viewed as this self-healing force that man was welcome to defy but could never vanquish. What we lack, to this day, are the really big important stories about what happens when nature fails to heal itself. ‘I’m small, nature’s big’ is pretty much all we’ve got at the moment.” 

 

For Hyttinen, Lonka’s efforts to incorporate nonhuman animals into literary narratives as fully fledged subjects in their own right represent an attempt to dismantle these old paradigms and to put forward an entirely new way to tell our story through some much-needed foundational narratives. 

 

The views put forward by climate activists on consumerism and environmental targets may be seen by many as radical demands for a complete change of direction. In the same vein, Pipsa Lonka’s formal experiments and proposals for the representation and inclusion of nonhuman animals appear equally radical in the context of how the natural world has been depicted within our literary tradition. 

 

Lonka points out that the issue is not our relationship with animals but our relationship with ourselves: how can we exist in relation to others? 

 

“The thing is that our entire sense of identity as human beings falls apart in the face of that question. It’s painful to contemplate, and it ought to be. When I think about the way the theatre of the absurd emerges after the second world war, it’s clear that it’s driven by this attempt to grapple, in the aftermath of an unimaginable crisis, with the question of who we really are. Climate change has left us facing that very same paradigm again.” 

 

Elisa Aaltola says that in the field of anthrozoology, researchers have begun to investigate human political issues in relation to their impact on animals. And in the natural sciences questions are being asked about the role language plays in shaping our attitudes towards others. Would it be possible for us to use highly charged terms like “concentration camp” or “genocide” in reference to animals? 

 

Several of Pipsa Lonka’s works have emerged from multidisciplinary collaborations involving both art and science. Two such projects, Voiko eläintä kertoa? and Elonkirjon äänettömät ja puhe niiden puolesta¹, have allowed Lonka to engage with new scientific perspectives in the context her own artistic practice.  

 

“The latter project was about exploring how our emotions shape our words and then, by the same token, our attitudes. It really was essential to Peter lived in a house – a dolphin dot-to-dot actually coming together. If it hadn’t been for these two projects, I might never have even glanced in that particular direction.” 

 

For Lonka, the projects have been an opportunity to challenge herself. Thanks to them, she has been able to tackle the questions that anthrozoology poses. 

 

“Typically, when I’m in a meeting, I’ll be making notes and wondering how on earth I’m going to manage to address the themes that we’re discussing through the medium of a play. This time, I gave an early version of the play to the academics attached to these projects and I got to hear it read aloud. Lots of interesting discussions then ensued. The script definitely emerged as a result of the dialogue I had with that very select audience, but I’ve not tried to hide that in any way. I think the play is accessible to and can be understood by what you might call mainstream audiences. That’s not to say of course that there aren’t references in it that someone of an academic bent might particularly enjoy.” 

 

The relationship between nonhuman animals and humans is a particularly topical subject at the moment. sky every day, which received its Finnish-language premier last autumn, drew a diverse crowd of theatregoers to the & Theatre in Espoo. In fact, such was its success that new dates have already been announced for January 2025. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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