What's 'global' about 'global Shakespeare'? The case of Perttu Leppä's 8 päivää ensi-iltaan [8 Days to the Premiere]
Nely Keinänen
Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Correspondence address:
Department of Modern Languages
P.O. Box 24 (Unioninkatu 40)
FI-00014 University of Helsinki
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What's 'global' about 'global Shakespeare'? The case of Perttu Leppä's 8 päivää ensi-iltaan [8 Days to the Premiere]
Especially Iin the last two decades, academic criticism has increasingly begun paid ying attention to Shakespeare as a global phenomenon: "Shakespeare" is being produced in theaters and entering popular culture in almost every corner of the globe, demonstrating what Kenneth S. Rothwell calls "the universal appeal of Shakespeare as 'a cultural trophy'" (160) and "Shakespeare's prodigious cultural capital" (210).[1]While academics might worry about distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, canonical or subversive Shakespeares, theater practioners, film-makers, marketers and a host of others cultural producers just get on with the business of doing Shakespeare, whatever that may be. This essay aims to contribute to the growing body of criticism examining the ways Shakespeare functions in local, national, and global contexts through analysis of the Finnish film 8 Days to the Premiere (2008), a romantic comedy in the spirit of Shakespeare in Love which tells the story of a theatrical company putting on Romeo and Juliet.[2]Although virtually unknown outside of Finland, the film might nevertheless serve as a useful test case in analyzing the complex forces contributing to the marginalization of Shakespeares produced in minority languages and cultures.[3] I will have less to say about the failure of the local to go global, i.e. for 8 Days to achieve international recognition, given that relatively few foreign language Shakespeares manage to cross lingual and other barriers to international distribution.[4] Rather, I am here more interested in the pressures the global asserts on the local:[5] in other words, even as they remain resolutely local in terms of their audience appeal or marketability abroad, local productions might at least partially be judged on "global" terms, or more precisely, on terms set forth by (primarily) Anglo-American Shakespeare, which can have serious consequences on their reception back home. If notions of "fidelity" or "authenticity" (and production values) come from the outside (and from those with much better financing), it becomes that much harder to create a Shakespeare product which will succeed even in its local context, to say nothing of beyond. These failures have important repercussions for cultural production more generally in these minority languages and cultures. At the end of the essay, I turn briefly to another kind of marginalization, that of sexual minorities. Romeo and Juliet has inspired a number of gay and lesbian appropriations, a theme which surfaces in Leppä's film as well (through the inclusion of a lesbian couple whose unclosetting parallels the coupling of the actors playing Romeo and Juliet). The film's relatively nonchalant treatment of the lesbian theme is possible, even expected, in the Finnish context. So if the first part of the essay demonstrates the ways that "global" standards might be shaping reception of Finnish Shakespeare, the latter demonstrates the limits of such influence.
A key issue in analyzing Shakespeare adaptations in popular culture is the marketability of the Shakespeare brand, so I will begin by providing a brief history of Shakespeare in Finland, before considering in more detail how 8 Days was marketed. In Finland, as I assume in most other foreign countries around the world, Shakespeare entered culture through the work of translators and theaters, and then was slowly absorbed into other forms of popular culture. As Shakespeare moves out of conventional theaters and into other realms, concerns are raised about the relationship between "Shakespeare" and what Richard Burt calls "Schlockspeare" ("Introduction" 8), and how both can be used to generate profits. Elizabeth Abele notes that the numerous examples of Shakespeare in popular culture demonstrate that "Shakespeare" is becoming a brand to be exploited:
Toward the end of the twentieth century, the Shakespearean canon emerged as a non-threatening cultural authority in a multicultural society. No longer the undisputed property of the upper-class, Shakespearean references again circulate as the currency of the realm (7).
Though as Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt in their study of American Shakespeare movies of the 1990s point out, the Shakespeare brand is itself unstable, and the Shakespeare name can in fact be a "marketing liability" (11), in part due to the (perceived) nature of audiences:
The popularization of Shakespeare on film, video, and television--which began inside the stalworthy liberal tradition of noblesse oblige attempting to bring culture to the masses--now finds itself, in America at least, in a strictly market-responsive milieu in which literary knowledge is in general a decidedly low capital, frequently mockable commodity, caught within the peculiarly American ambivalence about intellectualism, and therefore to be eschewed at all costs (12).
In this context, one tendency might be to "dumb down" Shakespeare for commercial purposes, for example by getting rid of Shakespeare's language (e.g. the slew of teen movies set in American high schools, though a clear exception to this is Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet). Another way to reduce the Shakespeare in "Shakespeare" is to make what Kenneth S. Rothwell calls "mirror movies," i.e., movies about the making of a theatrical production where the offstage lives of the actors playing the roles mirror the events of the play (209).[6] In this way, you can include some kind of Shakespearean theatrical experience without having to include the whole play, which is Leppä's technique as well.
Shakespeare's marketability is an important concern in global Shakespeare as well, though it's important to recognize that the marketing potential of Anglo-American Shakespeare is worlds apart from that of foreign-language entrants in the field. Consequently, and perhaps paradoxically, much--or even most--of what we are calling "global Shakespeare" are intensely local phenomena, produced in languages which may not be widely spoken outside of specific geographical regions, make cultural references which no amount of clever subtitling will ever open up to a foreign audience, and are unlikely to be distributed widely outside of the initial target culture. In other words, with rather few exceptions (e.g. Akira Kurosawa), there doesn't seem to be much of a global audience for Shakespeare spinoffs produced in languages other than English.[7]
Another part of the intensely local nature of global Shakespeare is the very different historical legacy of Shakespeare in any given culture. Each country has its own history of the ways Shakespeare was brought into the culture, when the plays were first translated and produced, for what reasons, and at what cost—and all of these at least theoretically have an effect on the types of spinoffs currently being created. For example, Poonam Trivedi notes that in India, "translation, adaptation, rewriting and transformation are sanctioned practices of literary creation," so "the initial indigenous response to Shakespeare in India was to adapt and Indianize" (47). By contrast, as Boose and Burt insightfully remark, "America's relationship to the Bard has frequently been marked by all the signs of a colonized consciousness" (13), whereby Shakespeare films cast American stars but British actors,[8] and the one popular genre where Americans seem most fully to embrace Shakespeare is the musical, a homegrown product (13). The Finnish adoption of Shakespeare follows a similar, though considerably deeper, trajectory through feelings of cultural inferiority.
Efforts to translate Shakespeare into Finnish were intricately connected to nationalistic efforts in the late 19th century to promote the Finnish language and culture, which were thought necessary to help secure independence from Russia. The Finns had already been introduced to Shakespeare through travelling Swedish- and German-speaking acting troupes in the 18th century, but Shakespeare was not translated into Finnish until the 1830s, and the first complete Finnish-language performance (Romeo and Juliet)was not until 1881.[9] For a people who had been ruled by the Swedes (1300-1809) and then by the Russians (1809-1917), Shakespeare came to represent the very best of world culture, something which might free them spiritually, if not also politically, from the chains of oppression. At birthday celebrations for Shakespeare in 1864, Fredrik Cygnaeus, a leading intellectual and nationalist, called Shakespeare "a spirit who had understood the deepest depths of world history" and whose poetry "had affected the entire civilized world" (qtd in Rein 1).[10] And indeed, it seems that one of the main reasons for bringing Shakespeare to the Finnish stage was to enable Finns to appreciate, perhaps even learn from, Shakespeare's deep understanding of human nature, of the human condition.
Cygnaeus also touches on fears that come up again and again in these early writings, that somehow Shakespeare is "too high" for the Finns, even as he represents the very culture and civilization they are striving for:
The question is whether we should attempt to become a link in the chain of civilization spread across the globe; we cannot throw away this connection, claiming that Shakespeare does not affect us, that it is too high for us, that it is not our way to interfere in the affairs of others. We believe we have the right to count ourselves among the civilized peoples of the world, and to make our rights known. That is why today we are celebrating Shakespeare's birthday. (qtd in Rein 1)
These fears of the inadequacy of the Finnish language, and indeed of the Finnish people themselves, are echoed in other writings of the time. August Ahlqvist (1826-1889), a translator and professor of Finnish, is typical:
In our opinion, it is still too early to begin translating Shakespeare into Finnish; in our language, the vocabulary needed to express the exalted things the poet describes is still unsettled and unformed; our language is still teetering clumsily in its new poetic clothes. And it is doubtful that we will ever get Shakespeare to sound in Finnish the way it sounds, for example, in Swedish. Finnish is by nature very different than the Germanic languages (qtd in Rissanen 202-03).[11]
Translating Shakespeare and other classics was also seen as a way of enriching the Finnish language. Speaking at the funeral of Paavo Cajander (1846-1913), the first important Finnish-language translator of Shakespeare, E. N. Setälä gives some idea of Cajander's significance for the development of the Finnish language:
There is a huge leap from Lagervall's childishly naive attempts at translating Shakespeare to Paavo Cajander's perfectly formed poetry.[12] These translations represent a complete era in the history of Finnish literary language, an era during which Finnish developed from a primitive state into a real language of civilization. . . And nothing shows the extent of Paavo Cajander's achievement more than that today, in part due to his work, the Finnish language has developed to the point where it is capable of expressing the best that mankind has been able to express in poetry (qtd in Rissanen 204).
In addition to fears over whether the Finnish language was capable of rendering Shakespeare, in the 19th century there was not a national theater capable of performing these works. Because the first complete play performed in Finnish in Finland happens to be Romeo and Juliet, also used in 8 Days, I want to trace a bit of its early history in Finland to show how significant this first production was for the national psyche. The director of the Finnish Theater (now the Finnish National Theater) finally found a Finnish-speaking actress who could play Juliet in Ida Aalberg (1857-1915); Aalberg's popularity was instrumental in helping to establish the young theater. Rehearsals began in February, 1881 with the opening night scheduled for March 16, the 50th anniversary of the Finnish Literature Society, but then these plans had to be abandoned when Alexander II was murdered in St. Petersburg on March 13 and all performances at the theater were cancelled for the next two months.[13] The play opened on May 3 to wide acclaim. After the performance, J. J. F. Perander (1838-1885) sent Aalberg a letter describing her performance which demonstrates the ongoing concern with producing "genuine" Shakespeare:
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your Juliet! Your interpretation was masterful down to the smallest nuances. From your very first entrance, everything is genuine, soulful Shakespeare! (qtd in Heikkilä, 133)
Another big fan of Ida Aalberg was Juhani Aho (1861-1921), a prominent Finnish novelist. Nearly thirty-five years after witnessing this first Shakespearean production, Aho wrote about it in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare (1916), which was published in England by Oxford University Press on the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death. Aho describes Aalberg's physical beauty, her temperament, her interpretations, some in amazing detail. He concludes his tribute to Shakespeare by discussing the significance to Finland and the Finnish language of this first performance:
Every Shakespeare performance has in some way advanced, deepened and broadened our young culture. In this respect, that premiere 35 years ago was not just an artistic but also a patriotic cultural victory.
With that performance, we proved to ourselves that we were a cultured people, that our language was a European cultural language. The Finnish language was no longer just the language of the old epic Kalevala, not just the language of lyric folk poetry and folk drama, but a language capable of expressing the greatest dramatic feelings, an exquisite modern poetry. In this sense, in his Finnish form, Shakespeare is for us a national poet (542).
Romeo and Juliet continues to be one of the most performed Shakespeare plays in Finland, though nowadays it tends to inspire theatrical experiments, such as Otso Kautto's all-male production (Teatteri Pieni Suomi, 1992) and Hilda Hellwig's bilingual production at Lilla Teatern (1999), where the Capulets spoke Finnish and the Montagues Swedish (a protected minority language in Finland spoken as a mother tongue by approximately 6% of the population). In terms of Shakespeare films, however, there was not a long tradition of Finnish films for Leppä to capitalize on. The best-known Shakespeare film abroad continues to be Aki Kaurismäki's Hamlet liikemaailmassa [Hamlet Goes Business](1987). Kaurismäki's film was the second in a planned trilogy, the first of which was Pauli Pentti's Macbeth (1987).[14] In 1998, Kari Paljakka directed a made-for-tv film, Loppu hyvin [Ends Well], whose plot is outwardly similar to Leppä's: Loppu hyvin is a farcical comedy following the adventures of a theater company performing Hamlet, whose director gets injured and is replaced by a young, eager one. The publicity material tantalizing concludes: "Fortunately, the cast knows the play and knows what to do..."[15]
Perttu Leppä did not set out to make a Shakespeare film, but as he developed characters and themes, Romeo and Juliet gradually came into the picture. Leppä's previous films had focused more exclusively on male characters, and now he wanted to look at romance from the woman's point of view. At some point in the process, he began thinking about Shakespeare's Juliet, and wondered if he could create a story where Juliet, faced with the death of her boyfriend, would choose life. The film's main plot thus revolves around Vilma (Laura Birn), a former star acting student, reduced to prompter by the traumatic death of her boyfriend in a car crash. Vilma is called in to replace Noora (Iina Kuustonen), the actress playing Juliet, when Noora leaps off the balcony and tears some ligaments in her knee during a rehearsal seven days before opening night. Predictably, the shy Vilma and Lauri (Mikko Leppilampi), the actor playing Romeo, fall in love, though Noora does all she can to ensure that the pair will fail both on and offstage. Leppä wanted his film to be more of an ensemble production, so he devotes quite a bit of screen time to various subplots. Vilma's little sister, Jenni (Ada Kukkonen), a Goth whose highest goal in life is to be dead, is sent to live with Vilma by their monster mother (a hysterical performance by Outi Mäenpää). At Vilma's apartment she meets two dead people, the ghosts of actors playing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, who were killed in an accident at the theater in the 1980s. Ros (Unto Helo) and Gil (Timo Lavikainen), who were Lauri's childhood idols, are "ectoplasmically" stuck to a red sofa Vilma buys at a theater auction, and midway through the film they are reunited with Jimi the Head (Jimi Pääkallo), a lighting designer who lost his body in the same accident and who has been stuck to a matching chair bought by Lauri. In addition to the comedy brought in by these fantasy elements (best parts of the film, in the eyes of many reviewers), there is also a much more somber story of Lauri's mother Mame, a theatrical diva now dying of cancer, who learns by the end of the film that "there's always time." As a global spin-off, this film predominantly shares features with "dumbed-down" Hollywood retellings of Shakespeare's plots (e.g. appeals to youth culture through the Goth elements, casting of well-known and popular actors), but it also includes quirkier and darker elements (ghosts, Mame), as well as a meditation on another type of forbidden love, that between BB the set designer, who becomes Vilma's best friend, and Charlotta, the wife of the play's director, a theme I will return to later.