Das Gespenst der Normalität

A man whose hair and skin are so light he could be called an albino, reads out a death notice. This is how the play begins. “The albino” is played by a woman. His identity eludes categorisation. In the final scene we will see his funeral, in which he openly asks why nobody ever said the sort of beautiful things that are contained in the eulogy to him while he was still alive.

Characters like this one appear, disappear and re-appear again in the quirky cycle of scenes Das Gespenst der Normalität (The Phantom of Normality) by the Finnish playwright and director Saara Turunen. The title is inspired by Luis Buñuel’s film The Phantom of Liberty. Whereas the film examines social liberty in a series of surrealist episodes, the play drills down into our notions of the normal and the everyday. It tells of our yearning for what we are accustomed to and also of the threat of being different, the fear of standing out from the crowd.

Quiet minimalist scenes, some of them entirely lacking in language but with an eloquent sense of humour, are joined together seamlessly to develop an almost film-like spell: a family watching TV, a small wedding, a woman learning vocabulary, a woman at couples’ therapy, schoolchildren at a singing lesson and young men in a nightclub. But all these idylls contain tiny flaws: the world of this play is a connecting room where everyone is at home and yet a stranger. These people have wishes and fears: they want to belong, not to be noticed, to develop freely or to put others back in their place. Saara Turunen, born in 1981, tells these stories in a highly individual theatrical language, discovered here for the first time in the German-speaking theatre. She distorts what is habitual, creating an absurd world of dream-like images. It is almost as if the quirky melancholics from films by Roy Andersson or Aki Kaurismäki have ended up in the claustrophobic art tableaus of one of Susanne Kennedy’s theatrical productions. What does this look like? Certainly not normal.

The original version in Finnish was created in 2016 at the Q­teatteri in Helsinki and the Tampereen Teatterikesä.