Play Rape is a fierce and powerful, yet humorous monologue dealing with shame, the narrow line between fiction and reality as well as gender biased power structures on stage and beyond. In short, it is about life in our modern societies.
Anna Paavilainen‘s remarkable play was first premiered in 2014 and struck back then like thunder: it sold out several times the main stage of the Finnish National Theatre and reached a significant international acclaim.
Celebrating its 10-years anniversary Play Rape has now been rewritten into a 2.0 version and updated to match the post #metoo era. A little bit unfortunately, the play is as topical as ever.
In the new English version the stage will be taken over by the actress and translator Sanna June Hyde.
After the reading there is a Q&A and a conversation dealing with the challenges of translating auto-fictional plays into different languages and cultural contexts, let alone new bodies. Play Rape has been translated into e.g. English, Swedish, German and Catalan.
Warmly welcome!
Play Rape 2.0 Working Group
Script & direction: Anna Paavilainen
English translation & performer: Sanna June Hyde
Production: Eeva Bergroth
Supporters: Kone Foundation
Anna Paavilainen is a director, scriptwriter and actor. She has worked with theatre, performance art, film and music and has experimented with various combinations and interfaces of the mentioned throughout their life. Her theatre works Play rape and Sinuus and films Kaksi ruumista rannalla, Tottumiskysymys and Kikka! research gender roles, the gaze and its structures. Paavilainen is endlessly fascinated by the emotions a woman’s body evokes in society.
Eeva Bergroth For the past twenty years, Eeva Bergroth has worked versatilely in the field of Finnish performing arts as a producer, publicist and executive director as well as curator and translator. In addition to her production and administrative duties, Bergroth has translated plays from different languages into Finnish and translated e.g. plays by Mika Myllyaho and Kristian Smeds in German. A German version of Anna Paavilainen’s Play Rape was completed for the Theaterformen festival in Hanover in 2017.
June Hyde is a Finnish-British actor educated at the East15 Acting School. She has worked in theatres such as the Helsinki City Theater and the National Theater of Finland, to mention a few. June has depicted an array of characters from dramas to comedies for two decades. She has also performed as a singer and works a lot with her voice on different projects from art in museums to cartoon characters as well as narrating documentaries. She is a feminist and a mother to teenage daughters.
She translated Play Rape together with her partner Jehki Härkönen and has found the subject matter very familiar to her own experiences. ”I believe in laughter and that we can all learn new ways to think, for some, theatre is the single most important vessel for realisations.”