New Plays from Finland

Pipsa Lonka (born 1977) is a Finnish playwright and dramaturg who received her M.A. from the Helsinki Theatre Academy in 2007. Her repertoire of works is not bound to a single type of viewer but instead range from children to adults.  

 

The foundation of her plays are strong emotions and their central questions often ponder both the physical and mental relationships between people, art, and the surrounding world (especially nature). Her plays are often combined with observations on how our surrounding space may impact our existence and the ways in which these experiences may be verbalized through language. According to Lonka:

 

“I’m largely fascinated by the position of the human species in relation to other life and what sort of narrative the play is pushing forward with this narrative. It is possibly an analytical question: what does the human have the right to?”
(Nuori Voima Magazine 18 Sep 2020) 

 

Lonka’s plays aimed for younger audiences have been praised for their ability to have a dialogue with the target audience in their own terminology and language. They are often described as being multidimensional and successful in creating atmospheres and strong emotional states on the stage. She has worked in collaboration with theatres like Helsinki City Theatre, the Finnish National Theatre, Viirus and Q-Theatre.  

 

Lonka has won multiple awards both domestically and abroad, her most recent award being the 2018 Lea Award for best dramatic text of the year granted by the Finnish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild. This award was granted for her play Second Nature (Toinen Luonto). The play addresses the assumption that the human species is at the centre of the world and is therefore more valuable than other living species by default.

 

Her most recent play Sky every day (Neljän päivän läheisyys) premiered in Viirus Theatre in February, 2021. It is a posthumanist play about gulls and people. The play has been translated in Swedish, English, Russian, Danish and Spanish. In 2021 it won the Finnish-Swedish Boisman foundation award for playwrights.