18.8.2025

While going through the extensive collection of performance photographs, I have repeatedly had to reconsider the idea of a unique production. The photographs reveal, without compromise, how much theatre has borrowed from others or followed certain formulas.

This is particularly evident in photographs from the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, theatres had far more premieres per season than today, and new works toured the entire country within just a few years. In addition to the director, costumes or sets could also travel between theatres.

This kind of “recycling economy” thrived especially in operettas. The melodies of Die Bajadere by Emmerich Kálmán were whistled simultaneously in Helsinki, Viipuri, Tampere, and Vaasa. In the orientalist photographs of Die Bajadere, the sense of repetition is especially strong, as they feature similar costumes, sets, and even actors’ poses. The same applies to another popular operetta of the time, The Desert Song.

Not only in fashionable novelties but also in Finnish drama classics, the same poses and gestures recur alongside similar scenography. For example, photographs of Minna Canth’s Anna Liisa can be recognized by the characters’ repeated gestures in certain scenes. There is always coffee being drunk at the farmhouse table, or the anguished, braided-haired Anna Liisa repenting her deed (infanticide) with hands clasped. The posture of Mikko, the farmhand and father of Anna Liisa’s child, also appears similarly across different productions at different times.

Going through the performance photos in alphabetical order has also revealed new, interesting plays to me, such as George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza (1928), which has rarely been staged in Finland since. This political satire, whose Finnish title (The Emperor of America) feels timely now, premiered at the Finnish National Theatre in 1930. After that, it was performed at Turku Theatre in 1930 and Viipuri Stage in 1931. The appearance of the ministerial meeting in the first act is strikingly similar across theatres, down to the columns and tablecloth. Perhaps the director followed the playwright’s stage directions—so-called parentheses—literally, if such were included in the scene?

Although many such similarities can be found in the photographic material, it is important to remember that a performance always lives in the moment. No evening in the theatre is ever repeated in exactly the same way. Each performance is a unique event experienced together by the performers and the audience—reacting to one another.

Aino Kukkonen, PhD, Project Researcher

This is an artificial intelligence translation from Finnish.