A razor-sharp contemporary satire about the challenges of working together
Playwright Pasi’s career is in desperate need of a boost. When Pasi is commissioned to write a monologue about the life of an ordinary person from outside Helsinki, he chooses his barber Roja, who comes from an immigrant background, as his protagonist.
His choice is not entirely selfless: after failing to make a success of his own career, Pasi needs a hit play and believes the story will also attract media attention.
Roja, however, proves to be anything but an easy protagonist, and his life does not translate into a play quite as effortlessly as Pasi had imagined.
“Everything Pasi thought he had mastered in his profession begins to fall apart. This sparks an absurd struggle over who is actually telling whose story, and who is making a play about whom,” says writer and actor Mitra Matouf.
“What’s funny is that Pasi’s motives are not only humane but also selfish. He deserves a bit of a comeuppance for trying to ride on a motive like that,” says writer and director Atte Järvinen.
Friction in collaboration
Based on Matouf’s original idea, Ihmisiä ja kanoja was initially intended to be a monologue. In the end, however, writing the monologue became part of the plot, with the task falling to the protagonists themselves.
“The characters aren’t based on us, but the idea quickly emerged of two people: one who writes for a living and another who has lived the life the play is about,” Järvinen explains.
“They are two intelligent but completely different people who are constantly at odds. Pasi is a kind-hearted pessimist, while Roja is an optimist but also incredibly stubborn,” Matouf says.
Pasi and Roja’s collaboration raises the question of what makes another person’s life worth telling. What people themselves want to reveal about their lives—particularly when it comes to difficult experiences—may be very different from what others want to hear about them.
Matouf believes that suffering has become a kind of selling point: “The more suffering there is, the better it sells. I’m tired of these victim narratives.”
Flawed, relatable characters
In addition to Pasi and Roja, the stage is populated by nearly 30 characters, all played by three actors. According to Järvinen, the rapid role changes lend the production a farcical lightness.
“It felt natural right from the start, and it adds a cabaret-like costume-changing element that stories like this don’t usually have,” he says.
Matouf gets to play characters that have rarely been seen in Finnish theatres. “The people we see on our streets are incredibly diverse, but perhaps there has been a reluctance to portray them as they really are for fear of offending someone,” she says.
The production makes no attempt to polish its characters from immigrant backgrounds or present them as a homogeneous group. Instead, they are free to be flawed human beings with their own ambitions.
“We didn’t want them to be the benevolent quasi-angels of old films, whose sole purpose is to help the protagonist find themselves,” Järvinen explains.
Above all, however, Ihmisiä ja kanoja is a comedy-drama about trying to complete a shared project with honour. Matouf describes the play as relatable yet off-kilter, warm yet awkward. “It ranges somewhere between deadly serious and anarchic,” Järvinen sums up.
Text by Ida Henritius