An Open Letter to Sauli Niinistö
Dear Mr President,
My name is Dudley and I am an actor from Britain - Wait! don’t go! Please Mr. President this will only take a minute of your time... For 10 weeks we have been rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Svenska Teatern (Helsinki). There’s going to be romance, singing, dance, flying, a man dressed as a lion, fake guns, cross-dressing, an explosion, a piano, fake beards, a play within the play, real beards and cake. I think you’d really love it.
Sauli Niinistö is the Finnish president. I was told that the previous President could regularly be seen window shopping in Helsinki and attended and supported the theatre. I was told that was very unlikely to happen with Niinistö, thus this letter. - Dudley.
A video I made to celebrate the upcoming Olympic games.
Told By a Shakespearian Finnish Swede
I don't know if you've heard, but British theatre company, Told by an Idiot and Finland's Svenska Teartern have got together to create an exciting new show. It's not called, "Told by a Finn" (as I'd hoped) but instead, "En Midsommarnattsdröm".
A 4am taxi took me to London Heathrow last month, in an appropriately dream like state. I muttered to the taxi driver something about, "Helsinki... 7 weeks of rehearsal.... Acting... bilingual Shakespeare... Swedish speaking Finns... Naked sauna in the basement..." and then got on the plane.
I wasn't sorry to leave London. Apart from it being hugely exciting to be working for Svenska Teatern, London is besides itself with the Olympics at the moment. It's so busy there. First impressions of Finland are that it's peaceful, calm and stylish. Nobody lives here. I was warned, "Vappu will be crazy, be careful". It turned out to be 7 people wearing hats.
Here’s a blog entry I wrote for the Svenska Teatern blog after I’d been in sunny FInland for a few weeks. I composed it from my basement room, next to the sauna of our wooden house in Arabia. Finland was stunningly bright and sharply cold, with blue skies and piles of snow left over from the winter. Dudley.
Dudley Rees is an actor and director living in London. This blog is his online scrapbook, a place to explore the big questions of theatre - note down the good times and complain about the terrible, slow, agonising times.
Some entries will be more technical than others but hopefully all will be reasonably entertaining. At least as entertaining as the film, "Chappie".