"Theatre is bad", proclaims the play Beginning Middle End. Music and literature and culture in general are also bad, but theatre in particular is typically made by heterosexuals and is just “boring”.
Beginning Middle End is the latest artistic work by Arni Rajamäki, who graduated from the Theatre Academy in Helsinki in 2021. It is an anarchistic spoken performance. The play is intended to be performed by interchangeable actors that will encounter the text for the first time on the stage, as they are reading their lines.*
The play offers a full-frontal social critique in which frustration, fatigue and pent-up anger are fired off with sharp observations and poignant remarks on our time. The work is made up of rapid-fire lines of nihilistic humour, in which both mundane conversations between straight people as well as art conventions are given their due. The play is a boxing match against the norms of the outside world.
A 45-minute festival version of the work, based on Birgita Bonde Hansen's Danish translation, was performed at the Pink Pavilion Festival in Denmark in 2023. The performance was seen in both Copenhagen and Aarhus and produced by Blaagaard Teater.
The play was invited to the Tampere Theatre Festival in 2022 and has been performed at Teatteri Takomo in Helsinki in 2023, and at the Helsinki City Theatre in the spring of 2024. YLE Drama, the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, has published the work as an audio play.
A Swedish version of the play translated by Kasimir Koski premiered at Hangö Teaterträff in 2023, while an English translation by Kristian London is underway.
*The concept for the original production was based on an unrehearsed reading, in which the actor encounters the play for the first time in front of an audience, however the play may also be performed in other ways.
Written and directed by Arni Rajamäki, the reading drama BEGINNING MIDDLE END is one that I return to after many months. I want to cherish this play, not as a memory, but as something I hope to see again. It cries out and demands new comings, new stages, new audiences. A work far too unique and important to be forgotten. It is a work whose text speaks its mind. It does not pose, it does not perform. It is a raw text in which the body speaks.
(...)
The dramaturgy of BEGINNING MIDDLE END is meta at the same time as it propels a stream of consciousness and follows a discontinuous stream of thought, where sentences are not neatly sequenced. The text repeats and stays still, twists at the beginning and accelerates into full aggression. Then at other times it holds back and builds tension. The voice of this text is truly audible. It is not unclear who the voice belongs to. Since the actor reads the text in the now moment, as unaware as we, the audience are, of where the text is going, we are in a shared state of not knowing, and the dramaturg has the power of voice. On a textual level, we see the writer's hesitation. The actor in the fictional reality of the stage similarly hesitates because (s)he does not know where the thought will go next.
Hanna Helavuori, March 7, 2022
