Helka Maniken, S. E. Wilmer, and W. B. Worthen, eds. Theatre, History, and National Identities.(Book Review)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 www.wmich.edu/compdr

Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2001. Pp. 331. $36.00 paperback.

This is a superb collection of eleven essays which represents the work of faculty and graduate students in a series of seminars on theater and nationalism convened by Pirkko Koski at the International Centre for Advanced Theatre Studies at the University of Helsinki every summer between the years 1995 and 2000. The essays are grouped into three sections--"Creating Theater," "Creating the Nation"; "Interrogating National Discourse"; "Borders of National Identity"--in a book that promotes an investigation of how national identities have been constructed and revised in the theater, primarily in Finnish theater, vis-a-vis imperialism and multiculturalism.

Essays by Steve Wilmer, Hanna Suutela, and Freddie Rokem in the first section discuss how Finnish, Irish, and Israeli theater initially fostered a sense of national character, identity, and heritage by recourse to the epic side of their respective folk traditions as manifested especially in the Kalevada (Finland), the Tain (Ireland), and the Bible (Israel).

Wilmer traces the faded links between Finnish and Irish cultural nationalism back to German intellectuals (e.g., Friedrich Klopstock, Johann Gottfried von Herder) who restored a sense of pride in their own linguistic and cultural past by advancing a belief in the importance of the cultural traditions of the common folk and by encouraging the creation of German works of art which would compete with (instead of imitating) the values of the supposedly superior foreign cultural imports, especially from France and England. Wilmer astutely analyzes the complex relationships that Finnish and Irish theaters had with the imperial Russian and British governments in a brief but clear manner, highlighting the politics and particularities of cultural nationalism during the process of recovering and revamping old myths and folklore in both countries. He then gives a lucid and more detailed account of the ways in which national theaters, as producers of nationalist plays, contributed to awakening Finnish and Irish audiences to the possibilities of new constructions of identity and nationhood even though they were not always in line with concurrent audience notions of national identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

It is to nineteenth-century Fennomania that Suutela's essay turns the attention of its readers. This Finnish upper-class nationalist movement played a significant role in the formation of the first Finnish-speaking professional company, the Finnish Theater of director Kaarlo Bergbom. The agenda of the Fennomans for popular education and class conversion initiated a second phase in the history of the Finnish Theater which eventually became the National Theater of Finland. Thanks to its new board of directors and especially to the board's secretary, Antti Almberg-Jalava, who was close to the Peasant Estate, the second phase was presented as a new step in the development of the same company rather than as...

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