Inmates at women’s prison produce stage version of Little red Riding Hood
Nice girl with alcoholic mother abused by wolves
By Suna Vuori
Friday evening at the Vanaja prison in Hämeenlinna appears to be calm.
Inmates in a corner room of the light-yellow main building are playing pool, a few women in the courtyard sit and chat. The smell of coffee dominates the office, as people come and go. Outside the laundry is drying on the line, and summer flowers planted by the convicts sway in the breeze.
In some of the rooms, loud voices can be heard - Finnish, Russian, and simple English - but the doors stay shut.
It doesn’t exactly look like a penal institution at first glance.
Indeed, it hardly is an ordinary prison. It is the only women’s minimum security prison in Finland, where theatre is being used as a therapeutic recreational activity.
Under the guidance of director Hannele Martikainen, eight women, ranging from 23 to 63 in age, are rehearsing a a version of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, with some rewriting. There will be two public performances at the Hämeenlinna City Theatre on May 28th and 29th.
Five of the performers study outside the prison. One has been released, and one is on trial release, but the motivation and commitment to the project, which began last autumn, keep them coming back to the prison almost every day to take part in the rehearsals.
When rehearsals begin at six in the evening, the women move the tables of the dining room aside.
Some of them wear the furry “socks”, or wolves’ feet, designed by costume designer Riina Ahonen. Taija, who plays the title role in the play, walks around in red. Only the paws are white. Nurse Meeri, who is played by Eija in a white coat, is the play’s version of the woodsman. Tuula, who has the role of the wolf is completely dressed in black, all the way to her eye makeup.
They have sentences of up to ten years - some for manslaughter, and others for drug offences.
“Do I look good?” asks the youngest of the group, the wolf Laura.
“Yes!” the director answers. “And now, everyone into a group portrait.”
In the background, Ulla, who operates the tape recorder, puts on Schubert’s Death and the Maiden.
“Once upon a time there was a little girl, who was so sweet that she was liked by everyone who ever met her. But she was most loved by her mother, who did not know what good things she should give her child...”
In the play put on by the prison theatre group, the mother is an alcoholic who has been glued in front of the television, and Little Red Riding Hood is a nice girl who takes care of her mother and her ever-changing boyfriends, and who is easily taken advantage of by the crime-prone wolves.
“I need booze from somewhere. And money.”
The pack of wolves rob Red’s grandmother, who suffers from dementia, and they stab Red, who is resuscitated by the nurse who rushes to the scene.
The story is not the most cheerful possible, even though it does have a happy ending, but there is plenty of mirth at the rehearsals, with actors laughing at themselves, and at new lines that they come up with. The situations are familiar to the performers.
Five boys with close-cropped hair wait for their mother to finish the rehearsal. They gobble up the pizza bought by the prison warden and go to the yard to kick a ball around.
The mother is in a hurry to catch up with the boys, but the others stay to work on their monologues.
“I went into this, because there is very little to do in prison”, says Laura when the women are asked why they volunteered for the theatre project.
“I have terrible stage fright, but I thought that this would work as tolerance therapy. At first I felt that this is total crap. And when we realised that the improvisations that we threw in as jokes would be included in the performance, we thought, ‘oh no’. We did not agree to kick Granny, but that director of ours was so brutal that we had to beat Red.”
“No violence against the elderly!” Eija shouts from the side.
Taija, who has the title role, had previously been unable to do so much as take out the trash without medication.
“They say that cutting cloth for rag rugs is occupational therapy, but nothing has helped as much as this. I like to come here very much, I can take it when someone gives me orders, and I do the same thing again and again, and I do things linked with this performance even in my free time.”
“This is voluntary”, Tuula notes. “And at the same time we learn about new sides to ourselves. We can accept and control ourselves, and empathise a bit with the feelings of others. This gives us tremendous courage, and it helps prepare us for life on the outside.”
“It’s great to see here on the sidelines, how these people, whom I have learned to know over the years, are developing, and how the roles become more natural with each rehearsal”, says Ulla, who became the sound technician of the production. “This has been lots of fun - not boring at all.”
“I know from experience that often the most impossible of cases can perform wonderfully on stage”, says director Hannele Martikainen.
“In Britain they do theatre in youth prisons. In Italy theatre professionals work with the mentally ill, and it isn’t any kind of psychodrama or therapy - it’s art.”
The aim is to prepare a performance, not to heal the performer. The change comes as a by-product, if it comes at all. A professional director who comes form outside the community, has the courage to make demands, and at least at Vanaja, the inmates have had a high tolerance for taking orders.
“This is no art club where people do a little bit of something. At this stage, the almost daily rehearsals and the honing of lines hundreds of times would be tough for anyone. And then there are the performances! Lifting weights in the gym is much easier.”
The Vanaja version of Little Red Riding Hood has the structure and level of the story that is familiar to everyone. Then there is the level of everyday realism of the lives of women, and third is the level of their dreams, the monologues linked with everyday life, mercy, and forgetting, which the director has sought to express through the works of Finnish authors.
“I believe that dreams are what guide a person the most”, the director says, “even slightly broken ones”.
The director has noticed that even though the women have plenty of emotions, many lack the concepts with which to express sensitivity and beauty. “Perhaps it was also a surprise that there were no problems.”
“The various roles that the women have taken on in the prison have disappeared, and the women are helping each other in finding the right way to express things. One of them said that this is the best anger management course ever. This production also completely lacks something that often comes up in professional theatre: an adult man whining to me about how the colour of the trousers are preventing him from expressing his role fully.
These women do not easily whine about anything.
“Well, now we’re getting to the real thing”, Eija jokes, taking off her costume.
The wolf paws feel hot.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 23.5.2009
SUNA VUORI / Helsingin Sanomat
suna.vuori@hs.fi
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| 26.5.2009 - THIS WEEK |
 Inmates at women’s prison produce stage version of Little red Riding Hood |
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