Winner of the 2012 Lea Award for the best Finnish play of the year. Three women: a mother, daughter and grandmother. When the mother disappears, the daughter is left to take care of her suddenly demen...
“Welcome to my world, I say shyly, almost without a sound.” A Few Words About Ulla depicts the diverse dimensions of isolation and contact. From the seclusion of her apartment, a young...
“We’ve come a long way in many things. But in the course of things, people have often been passed over without consideration. Or with very little consideration.” When a person los...
”Very harsh, I’m telling you, to an eye that’s looked out of these windows all its life.” A Little Money is Sirkku Peltola’s story about Jason, a man who has lived his...
Photo albums full of special days as if life was nothing but a celebration A Special Day is a nostalgic deep-dive into the past of an average working class in post-war Finland...
How many of us can say they have truly been given unconditional love in their lives? And if you’re an ambitious and career-oriented sort of person, is that something you’d have time to pur...
Alina is a story about unconditional familial love in the face of addiction. Specifically, it is a story about a brother and sister, Emil and Alina, and the way in which Emil’s substa...
Milja Sarkola’s play follows one woman’s life from childhood to adulthood, limiting the perspective to feeling like an outsider, sensations of loneliness and shame, and the difficulty of c...
Antagonist (Antagonisti, 2015 /2018) is a contemporary tragedy which stems from Sophocles’ tragic heroine, Antigone. The play is a tragedy about loss, exclusion, and destiny. It is about accepting one...
The play's protagonist, a Person, suddenly falls outside of Time. It can happen to anyone. But what is there to do when time no longer moves forward and logic and understanding are not enough to save...
And so the glaciers melt and people change. Arctic Games (Arktiset Leikit, 2019), is the fourth and final part of the Klemola siblings’ Arctic trilogy. The story deals with heavy themes s...
“A person’s character. It’s infinite as space. We sometimes think we know a lot about a person, but at the same time we know nothing at all. Situations and moods change, every day a...
E. L. Karhu’s Princess Hamlet (Prinsessa Hamlet) may have been officially dubbed a “comic strip tragedy”, but its predecessor, Breadline Ballad (Leipäjonoballadi), has a very similar...
Bride of Christ is play in which each character searches for inner peace and justification for their own views on Christianity’s complex relationship with gender and sexuality. Marion is about to be m...
Broken Heart Story is the story of two women. The main characters are a mannish writer and her complete opposite, a vain and love-hungry scatterbrain. Both women seek happiness in the way they see bes...
Leea Klemola’s latest piece Vaimoni, Casanova ("Casanova, my wife" at the Kuopio City Theatre in 2016) is shamelessly over-the-top, in true Klemola style. It weaves together themes fro...
Kilometres below the surface of the earth, a guard sits alone, checking access passes and monitoring subterranean currents and radiation levels. This peaceful existence is shattered by a young female...
Otto Sandqvist’s play Celeste combines various possibilities audiovisual art with the idiom of drama. The works consists of excerpts, sit...
Eleven-year-old Henry comes from a good home. His parents are academic, highly educated, intelligent, progressive people, and there shouldn’t be any cause for concern. But Henry shocks his teachers by...
Cutting a Cake - A play about justice in six uneven slices (Att dela en kaka - sex olika stora bitar om rättvisa) is an exploration in justice and injustice. The play ponders who has the right to dete...
Queen Christina of Sweden was a rather unusual monarch for her time; not only did she pursue traditionally ”male” interests, but also suddenly abdicated her throne in 1654 and converted to Catholicism...
Dreamteam – a comedy on life management Do you feel your life doesn't have a clear direction? Are you always stressed, is your time management failing, do you need support for your th...
Koistinen and Meke work at a fast-food restaurant. Meke is a beginning burger-maker, while Koistinen has been at it for some time now. Meke must develop his mastery under Koistinen’s watchful eye to e...
Eriopis. Medea’s Daughter Survivor Tells All is a play by E.L. Karhu which explores the potential world and story of Medea’s daughter, Eriopis, if her life were to take place in modern-day Finland run...
Elena doesn’t have any reason to be feeling down. But when you’re feeling down, the causes aren’t always obvious, especially if you’re a lonely teenager who’s shy about her looks. Running and throwing...
Helvetin perhe (Family from hell) is an intense, abstract, funny, true, recognisable, realistic yet merciful play about family, about the human struggle to move from symbiosis towards being a separate...
The interviewees enter the space. The interviewer and interviewees introduce themselves, and then turn their attention to the photograph. Darkness. What do you see? The interviewer poses...
Juha Jokela’s Fog is a boldly topical comedy on self-censorship. The play portrays the position of a small nation at the side of a larger neighbor. The text examines the relationship between Fin...
Frau Höss and Friends is based on the real lives of wives of powerful Nazi officers. What part did these loyal hausfraus play in the Third Reich? How did they use their power and influence? Or were th...
Two stories, two realities—or even more? A dynamic new intern messes up the usual routines at the National Cultural Archives, and a mousy, hard-working older colleague finds herself unimportant....
Jack and Olly are childhood friends who have ended up working together in Jallu’s car repair business. Due to an unpleasant incident at work, the university-educated Olly has been forced to resi...
When we die, what will remain of us? A list of all our accomplishments, an assortment of flags of all the countries we visited, or perhaps a collection of hair kept for tracking down our greying proce...
Hornblende is a dark and lustrous mineral found in metamorphic rocks: the little piece of shine on a granite gravestone. The relationship between joy and sadness is like that of granite and hornblende...
“In a moral sense I am guilty, of course...but in legal sense...” Jari Juutinen’s play I Am Adolf Eichmann raises the question on guilt and innocence. Adolf Eichmann was one of th...
I guess I really am a racist then even though I don’t want to be one… who made me like this? Who did this to me and when did it all happen? After all I do have a master’s degree in p...
Lammassaaressa – komedia käyttäytymissäännöistä is an adaptation of an earlier play text by Tuomas Timonen. Timonen re-worked the play to suit a touring production for children by the theatre group TO...
Jessika’s Cub is a comedy about Jessika’s family, her role as a wife and a mother and her panic attack-inducing longing for nature and to get away from the technological world of today. Jessika, he...
Last Call is a tragicomedy about the curses of alcohol. A Presenter is hosting the World Championships in getting pissed with the charisma of a circus ringmaster, while encouraging the audience to do...
Kauko was a successful actor, until he had a breakdown in the middle of a performance. Now, he has decided to make a final break for freedom; come up with a lethal disease and stage his own death – wh...
19 hours and 34 minutes. That is how long it takes to fall in love. 6792 minutes and 157 listening sessions of Fred Again’s song Julia (Deep Diving). That is how long it takes before the memory of fal...
A married couple has been partying and brought a young girl home with them. During the night the girl overdoses and the couple has to decide what to do. (source: Nordic Drama Corner)
Medusa’s Room is a contemporary drama that serves as a commentary on what it is to be a woman and what it is to grow up into a woman amidst our male normative culture. At its core, Medusa’s Room is a...
Megan is a 13-year-old American girl whose life involves the typical teenage drama of friends and boy crushes. Unfortunately she also has an attention deficit disorder an aggressive mood swings. Megan...
Mother (Homoäiti) is a monologue about becoming a parent, about eternal parenthood and about ageing. It is about the realisation that our own parents are just as helpless as we are and about the proce...
Mount Everest is a play about the human psyche and how it manages to persevere through even the most difficult times. It is about unconditional love, loyalty, and sticking by one’s side even when...
My Capital (Pääomani) is a contemporary drama based on Milja Sarkola’s novel by the same name which deals with a large taboo in Finnish society: wealth inequality and money. However, it does not seek...
On the Grace of Officials is a dark comedy set in an asylum seeker detention centre. It’s about death, suffering and the logic behind the bureaucratic machine. At the centre of the play are encounters...
The most tender and poetic of Juha Jokela’s plays, The Patriarch premiered on the main stage of the Finnish National Theatre in the autumn of 2012. Written for the theatre’s 140-year anniversary, the...
Jack and Andrew are participants in a Back to Work scheme, and ground keepers at a soon to be disused sports ground. Neither Andrew, who has a mild disability, nor Jack, who does not have any greater...
American jazz musician Billy Tipton (1914-1989) was born and raised as Dorothy. As the young girl found it impossible to find work because of her gender, she decided to become a man. Dorothy, now call...
Princess Hamlet is a play by E.L. Karhu (formerly Emilia Pöyhönen), where insanity is examined from various perspectives. This overwrite of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet serves as an ambiguous independ...
Helena is a photographer in her thirties. Until recently, her life has revolved around marriage and motherhood. Anna, on the other hand, is a woman in her fifties and doesn’t have a family of her own....
Nature documentaries cover animals and nature, but humankind and its species-typical behavior are generally nowhere in evidence. This obvious gap is addressed by Second Nature. Pipsa Lonka’s pla...
A cloudless blue sky, a child running on the crystal-like sand, and a dead body in Room 303. Hidden behind the Do not disturb-sign, the slowly rotting corpse is not the only dead th...
The main character of Milja Sarkola’s play Something Different is a Woman, a theatre director who is working on a play featuring material from her personal sexual history. The Woman’s brot...
Specs and Normals * (Erkat ja tavikset) is the story of Olavi, a special needs kid who is trying to find his place in a regular class and of Roosa; a girl who has already given up on her ed...
He moves into a new apartment, which his parents have paid for after selling his childhood home near the frontier. Moving help is provided by his older brother, who doesn’t recommend buying yellow cur...
Superswitcher (Taikanaksutin) is a children’s play that explores gender roles and gender identities. Unbeknownst to the people of the World, space aliens from another dimension are responsible for giv...
Take Off Your Skin (Missä nyljimme kerran) is a black comedy about our competitive society where money rules and only the strongest survive. The characters play with the cards they have been dealt....
The Arrow Stoat (Nuolikärppä) is a fairytale that has something to offer for adults and children alike. Our main character is the Arrow Stoat, the hero of Swampland, who is given a task by the ki...
Sofia Aminoff wrote The Blazing Time – A Portrait of Two Women in a Room* (orig. Den lysande tiden – porträtt av två kvinnor i ett rum) as part of the UNO project for new Finnish drama in 20...
A woman sits alone in a restaurant. Images flash in front of her eyes. Her whole life she has wanted to be something else: a sweet, pure little girl, a sexy bombshell, an attractive wife. Someone wort...
Juha Jokela’s The Docents (Dosentit) explores conflicts in the academic world on many levels. The central character is Johanna Virtanen, whose research on the work environment at her home un...
The Family Member (Perheenjäsen) is a play about a theatre family who choose work over each other’s company. Milja Sarkola’s play is a witty and intelligent look at the world of theatre, the acti...
Have kids early, do not take more than one slice of cake, and if you masturbate, at least be ashamed! These rules embedded into most of us, especially women, at a very young age form an integral part...
The Map (Kartta) is a play that has been described as a modern-day version of Beckett’s famous play, Waiting for Godot. Some might categorize it as an unusual comedy. Some might call it an existe...
The Orchestra: A Study in Solidarity (Orkesteri – The Everlast. Tutkielma solidaarisuudesta) is a sister play to Pitch (Kenttä). The play asks the question of whether communality is possible....
A playwright gets a call from the mayor and finds himself in the city of Espoo brand team. Their assignment is to create a story and an identity for Espoo, something that captures the essence of the c...
“I have just one wish in life. And that is that I could be ordinary, just a normal person. And that my family would be ordinary too, just a normal family. That we wouldn’t stand out from the crowd, th...
Klemola's play The Shepherd (Maaseudun tulevaisuus) takes place in the future, where at some point Finland has been divided into two counties, north and south., Finland has been divided into two count...
In 1975, Finnish author Arto Paasilinna wrote The Year of the Hare (Jäniksen vuosi); a novel that quickly became a classic in Finland. Now, in the hands of playwrights Sami Keski-Vähälä, Esa Leskinen...
Winner of the New Baltic Drama 2011 competition in Finland, These Little Town Blues Are Melting Away (Lauluja harmaan meren laidalta) takes place somewhere on the coastline of the Baltic Sea, in...
To be Human (Toisen ääni) is a fable for adults about the aspiration towards goodness. In the play there is a brother and a sister both of whom will not refuse to leave their home because they ar...
They could not be more opposite: he, the handsome, idolized brother, and she, the ugly sister, overweight and lonely. And yet the two symbiotically share their lives; in their shared apartment, she wi...
The scene is set at an underground station. “The central, enduring image of the play is this: people waiting for a train.” At an underground station, layers of time and history intertwine. We see t...
Laura Valkama’s play What Happened and Say Hello (Miten kävi ja terveisiä) is an absurd drama divided into thirteen scenes that have no apparent link to each other. A wide range of increasingly e...
This moving drama of people caught in the turmoil of political power-play paints a shattering picture of Estonia in the twentieth century. The tale traces two phases of oppression: the period of Germa...
Once upon a time there was a cold country where no one respected beauty and love was deemed totally worthless. The only thing worshipped was price tags and only that which was useful was considered go...