A play men should see
After the success of Men Can’t Be Raped , actress Minttu Mustakallio returns to Lillan this autumn with a monologue based on Märta Tikkanen’s classic story The Love Story of the Century.
The fact that it was a text by Märta Tikkanen again was mostly a coincidence,” says Mustakallio, rejecting the idea that she is an expert on Tikkanen. As a native Finnish-speaker, she is nevertheless happy to have had the opportunity to get to know one of the iconic authors of Swedish-speaking Finland.
“Already in the autumn of 2020, when we made Men Can’t Be Raped , I felt in my bones and marrow how important Märta Tikkanen is to you Finland-Swedes. You read her already in elementary school and many have a strong personal relationship with her texts, so it is with a mixture of horror and enthusiasm that I take on her again. And it certainly took a bit of craziness, but as an actor, you have to challenge yourself to develop.”
Despite her own doubts, Mustakallio’s Swedish is, of course, excellent, and her interpretation of Tova Rander received nothing but praise from critics in 2020. But this time she stands alone on stage in a clever dramaturgy where Tikkanen’s poignant poems and prose are mixed with newly written text by dramaturg Aino Pennanen and director Riikka Oksanen.
“It’s fitting that we’re an all-female panel,” she says, only half-jokingly. “I approach the story strongly in the form of a woman. Despite the fact that almost forty years have passed since the novel was first published, it is as relevant as ever.”
In an interview for Yle in 2019, Tikkanen says that the lyrics that became The Love Story of the Century were never intended to be published. She wrote them as self-therapy, at night when the family was sleeping, out of an inner compulsion to address themes such as gender inequality, women’s responsibility for the home, liberation and self-realization, and the need to be seen and acknowledged.
“It’s a heavy story,” says Mustakallio. “And incredibly beautifully written from an absolutely terrible life situation with a narcissistic, violent alcoholic husband that everyone in the family is afraid of. In the play, we seek answers to how she ended up there, how she copes, why she does not leave and how a woman reasons under oppression and threats against her child. I can say that the man in the play does not get away easily.”
Märta Tikkanen’s brutal revelations kicked open the doors to the hellish backside of the bourgeois family idyll, and she was met with scepticism and even contempt when the book was first published in 1978.
“It was a different time, where men sat on long Kosmos lunches and drank, and women were expected to take care of the home and help. A lot has improved, but the fight for equality is still ongoing,” says Mustakallio. I myself have fought for the same salary as my male colleagues, even long before the MeToo movement swept through the cultural sector here at home.”
Although the working group began writing the play six months before the rehearsals began, much of the text has been created during the process in collaboration between the trio. It will be a performance with a strong presence and nerve when the three Finnish women serve a sharp and modern interpretation of the iconic Finland-Swedish story – a bit like Tina Lymi did with her new film adaptation of Stormskär’s Maja last winter.
“But I’m neither Swedish nor Finnish first and foremost – I’m a woman,” says Mustakallio, adding: “But it’s men who should see this play.”
Text: Janne Strang