Rabbiting around in Helsinki

Posted by Simon Bedford (Marketing & Touring Manager, Hoipolloi)

It's Monday evening and I'm now back home after my trip over to Helsinki with Hugh and Aled. Although international touring is exhausting in its planning, the pay-off of actually travelling out to the final destination is almost always worth the effort.

And Helsinki definitely didn't disappoint, with plenty of interesting stories to share!

The trip commenced on Thursday last week with a very early flight out of Heathrow (we checked in at 6am) with the delightful Finnair. Perhaps the most bizarre part of the flight was the addition of a CCTV camera at the front of the plane, giving us first a pilot's eye and then a bird's eye view of take-off and landing. It's actually quite fun to see the world become minature as the plane climbs up into the clouds but I'm not so sure I wanted to see us zoom down the runway and I definitely didn't enjoy seeing the pilot's (increasingly erratic) attempts to line us up with the runway to prepare for touch-down!

Over in Helsinki, the company were performing at Korjaamo, a new(-ish) theatre in the city. Actually to describe it as a theatre is a complete underestimation of what takes place there - it's actually a converted tram depot, with two gallery spaces, two theatres, a trendy bar, a delicious restaurant, a tram museum and even a TV studio (I think I made it onto Sub, a Finnish TV channel one night - in the background behind a continuity announcement!).

Anyway, I made this little video, which will give you a slightly better sense of the space we were performing in...



I think that Hugh and Aled were really happy with the show. It's always tricky to work out whether people outside the UK will totally understand and respond to the show in the same way but it's always fun/interesting to see what happens!

Our time at Korjaamo was part of their STAGE Festival, which in turn was part of the wider Helsinki Festival. With the city in a truly cultural mood, we found art popping up in lots of random places and on Friday evening, we were entertained by numerous choirs (including a group of Helsinki's policewomen) everywhere we went. They were at Korjaamo and even at a restaurant where we ate that night. The brochure for this mini-festival also provided us with our other entertainment for the evening - reading the different English translations of the copy...

For example, how do you fancy seeing some...

"Elderly young people pull solid rock songs about streetcars amd [sic] booze-vapored moments of enlightment"

or how about...

"The best female vocalists sing their audience into oblivion"

or my favourite...

"Love poems and sounds of liking a special person"

Actually I shouldn't mock too much as Finnish people speak far far better English than my very poor attempts at basic Finnish! I think I managed only to master "thank you" or "kiitos".

And it is a big "kiitos" to Raoul and all the staff at Korjaamo for inviting us over to Helsinki and making us feel so welcome.

Finally, as a way of bringing my trip neatly to a close and in tribute to the tram depot that hosted us for a few days, the final leg of the journey back to my flat in England was made by tram. Although this time sadly from the far less glamorous location of Croydon!

Hoipolloi elsewhere on the web...

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)

I've just given our MySpace page a long overdue update and created a Hoipolloi Facebook Group to complement the Hugh Hughes Appreciation Society.

If you'd like to join either of the groups or add us as a friend on MySpace please feel free to click the links above. (It'd be great if you could write on the Facebook wall too, at the moment it's depressingly bare!)

Don't forget that you can subscribe to this Blog by clicking on the menu to the right. And if you haven't done so already, have a look at our YouTube channel for video previews of The Doubtful Guest and interviews and backstage footage with Hugh Hughes.

Some Facts

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)

Things are pretty quiet in the Hoipolloi office at the moment. Steffi Muller, our Associate Director, is away in Edinburgh performing with our friends Menagerie. (Click here for details of the show, Correspondence.) In fact, I’m the only person I know who isn’t going to the Fringe this year. And in the meantime, whilst everyone else in Theatre-land is busy at the Festival, the phone here is quiet and my inbox is empty.

To pass the time, I’ve been learning about Helsinki. That’s because on Thursday Hugh Hughes and Aled will be flying out to Finland to perform Story of a Rabbit at the Korjaamo Culture Factory. The set and lots of our technical equipment is already on its way and I had a great time rummaging around the Hoipolloi store last week, until Richard, our Production Manager, forced me to stop exploring and do back-breaking labour while we packed up the freight. (The Story of a Rabbit set is really heavy.)

Anyway, before we go into Fun Facts About Finland, I should say a couple of things:

1) I have learned everything I’m about to tell you from the internet and Wikipedia. It may or may not actually be true.

2) A lot of the aforementioned websites preface their facts with the adjective “fun” and, frankly, they don’t deliver. I don’t consider statistics pertaining to population demographics to be fun. Nor is the fact that the country’s dialling code is 358. By contrast, my Finnish Facts will be 100% Funtastic.


FACT 1:
Helsinki? More like HELLsinki. Such was the outrage when “hard rock quintet” Lordi bagged Finland’s first ever Eurovision victory in 2006. The group is fronted by the inimitable Mr. Lordi. Past band members with amusing names include a bassist named G-Stealer. Apparently he was kicked out of the band because he kept stealing all the G’s from the band’s alphabet fridge magnet set.

FACT 2:
There’s a statue of a super-sexy mermaid in the market square in Helsinki. On the 1st of May every year, students gather round the statue to celebrate the arrival of Spring. (And to stare at a sexy mermaid, probably.) The statue hasn’t always been popular though. When it was unveiled in 1908, women’s rights groups protested that it objectified women. Two years previously, women in Finland had been granted the vote: that’s 20 years before the same happened in this country. (Wow, those Scandinavians are progressive.)

FACT 3:
The city’s animal symbol is a squirrel.


Well, I'm sure you all got a lot out of that.

Let's finish with a video of Lordi, performing their song, Would You Love a Monsterman?

Gorey accomplices

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)

A quick hello to some fellow Gorey-lovers Hoipolloi have met in cyberspace....

The Edward Gorey House in Massachusetts exhibits original copies of Edward Gorey's illustrations and celebrates his life and work, in the very house in which Gorey lived. It also honours Gorey's compassion for animal welfare issues by supporting local and national animal welfare projects. You can visit their website by clicking here. They've even got Doubtful Guest t-shirts in their online shop!

Goreyography is an online compendium of all things Gorey. There are articles about Gorey being translated into Japanese, first edition Goreys for sale and, my favourite, an online exhibition of the front covers Gorey designed for Anchor paperbacks (not a million miles from the British Penguin Classics series). For a lesson in Goreyography, click here.

Happy browsing!

A pornographic work by Ogdred Weary

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assitant, Hoipolloi)

"Alice was eating grapes in the park when Herbert, an extremely well-endowed young man, introduced himself to her."

What better way to liven up a Monday morning than with some titillating quotations from Ogdred Weary's "pornographic work" The Curious Sofa?

"Downstairs the three of them played a most amusing game of Herbert's own invention called 'Thumbfumble'."

"Ogdred Weary" is, of course, an anagram of "Edward Gorey", the maverick writer and illustrator whose book The Doubtful Guest Hoipolloi have adapted into a rather wonderful play. (You can find out a bit more about the eccentric Mr. Gorey in one of my previous posts here.)

The Curious Sofa is Gorey's only "pornographic" work and retains all the charm and playfulness of the rest of his oeuvre. Gorey's only teasing us by putting the word "pornographic" on the book's cover. Although every page is illustrated in his trademark style, there's nothing too salacious in view. But that's not to say our imagination won't run wild...

"To beguile the tedium of the journey, Albert read aloud from Volume Eleven of the 'Encyclopedia of Unimaginable Customs'."

Don't forget that Hoipolloi's production of The Doubtful Guest is back on tour in the autumn. It's not quite as naughty as an Ogdred Weary book but it's still great fun and The Guardian were kind enough to say that it "captures all the Victorian pastiche, fantastical imagination and ominous air of Gorey's original."

All the tour dates are here and tickets are on sale now! You can also see some video previews of the show here.

"Still later, Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a saucepan."