Lost in a swirl of past and future

Scots, Finns and Irish are all viewed as minorities. That's why a Scots version of Finnish play 'Olga' will work here, playwright Laura Ruohonen tells Peter Crawley

One day in Finland an actress rushed into rehearsals upset, breathless and very late. As is customary, she gave her excuse. During the night, a burglar had broken into her elderly friend's apartment, rousing the old lady from her sleep. Instead of calling the police, her friend became infuriated. She forced the young burglar to sit down, share a cup of coffee and to explain to her why he was wasting his life.

"I thought, this is the perfect story for me," recalls Laura Ruohonen, the Finnish playwright and director whose rehearsals were so serendipitously disrupted. At the time she had been planning to write something about history and the ever-changing world. "I knew that I wanted to have a very old character and a very young one - but I didn't know how to get them together."

Olga, her play about an extraordinary relationship between a spirited, lonely old woman and a recalcitrant young dosser, would become an astonishing success at the Finnish National Theatre, running for a year and a half. For Rough Magic Theatre Company, whose Irish première opens tomorrow, it seems significant that Ruohonen's epiphany came second-hand.

Coming to Dublin's Project theatre in a Scots translation by playwright Linda McLean, the play has had what Lynne Parker calls "an L-shaped journey". The artistic director of Rough Magic originally directed the British première of Olga for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in December, 2001, before electing to stage a rehearsed reading of the play for her own company's SCAN season late last year.

"Linda McLean won't have you say that it's an English version," cautions Parker, "she's very particular about it being a Scots version. I thought this was interesting and curious, because if you're trying to translate from one idiom into another, then it doesn't always work to simply relocate the play to your own environment. I'm more interested in parallels than direct overlaps." More so, it seems, than rerouting it through a Dublin idiom.

"I'm not saying that couldn't be done," says Parker. "I'm sure it could, but it would be a completely different beast." If anything, audience approval at SCAN's rehearsed reading gave her greater confidence in the translation. "Not only was the Scots version working for them, but it was actually helping . . . Now clearly we can't do the play in Finnish. But we are setting it in Helsinki and the surrounding woods." Accordingly, in McLean's version, Finland's capital will be populated by foreigners. Or, as Sartre almost put it, Helsinki is other people. This hasn't been easy for everyone to fully comprehend.

When I visit rehearsals, Rosaleen Linehan, who plays the eponymous Olga, admits to having initially found McLean's dialogue inscrutable. (Sample line: "Up to noo, Ah've let maist ae yir patter go in wan ear and oot the other, bit Ah'm listenin. So tell me. Whit should Ah be daen?") A forthcoming production in England, for instance, will avoid the Scots translation and Ruohonen finds it revealing: "That tells you something about the differences between these cultures; how the Scots, Irish and Finnish see each other, compared to a culture which sees itself as \ - we all come from minorities compared to them."

"The good thing about it," says Fergal McElherron, "is that it makes it 'not of here', i.e. Ireland. But it's not so far away that we can't identify with it." Such otherness is the currency of the play both in language and tone.

"It's nuts," McElherron adds, speaking of his criminal character Rundis. "He starts off coming in to rob this woman and ends up taking her birdwatching. And that's just one scene."

Linehan recalls her last job, a Broadway production of Tartuffe for Joe Dowling, in which the American actors practically staged a coup against their voice coach. "They brought in a voice coach to impose posh RSC voices on them," she says, "and the whole cast said No, this is a French play. Why should we put on English accents in a French play? And of course they were absolutely legitimate \." There are no signs of a similar insurrection here against imposing a Scottish accent on a Finnish play.

"It's actually multiple accents," corrects Linda McLean from her home in Winchester. "The young chap Rundis, in the Finnish version, doesn't speak that much differently from the older, better-educated woman Olga, whereas that wouldn't be the case on the west coast of Scotland. In actual fact, nowadays someone of that age would speak a Glaswegian that's very much influenced by American dialect . . ."

Such suspicion over the memory-eroding tides of progress and the seeping influence of alien cultures is a potent theme in Ruohonen's work. Olga, for instance, laments the receding of the Finnish forests and of stately old homes, but remains optimistic about the future; an unscrupulous antique dealer simply ransacks the past for profit; a bizarre policeman exists in a perpetual present, meticulously videotaping everything, and watches his wedding video during the actual reception. Rundis meanwhile has a postmodern nihilism - celebrating the world's disintegration, the bliss of apocalypse. Birds are quickly disappearing while mobile phones twitter louder.

Written in 1995, the play seems pregnant with the threat of European unity: that an individual culture will be lost in assimilation.

"Finland has been a very poor country that has industrialised very quickly," explains Ruohonen at home in Helsinki. The playwright is expecting a child four days into the Dublin production's run and has been forbidden from travelling. "The past seems very poor and often shameful," she says, "something people want to forget. The idea is that we have to be very modern at any cost, very IT, very Nokia. And the most beautiful villages are kind of offered up, to show that we are not backwards. This is an example of not respecting or understanding the past, but trying to be a new, small America." Ruohonen suggests that this stems from a history of cultural oppression and compares Finland to the titular character in Goldoni's comedy, The Servant of Two Masters, tussled over by two powerful forces: Sweden to the east and Russia to the west.

"There are interesting parallels we discovered laterally between Finland and Scotland," says McLean. "Both share large neighbours and the whole issue of cultural imperialism in the very language raises its head." It is not difficult to spot an Irish similarity, or those parallels and perpendiculars that so intrigue Lynne Parker.

It seems, however, that each interview soon becomes an explicitly political discussion. "It's not heavy," Rosaleen Linehan suddenly protests in the rehearsal room, lest Scandinavian theatre appear stodgily off-putting. "It actually wanders through the necessity for beauty in everybody's life." It's a good point, as is her understanding of the play as a dream narrative. "I think of it of it as somebody falling into a dream of what might have been in her life," where the images become "all mixed up". Likewise, although McLean's dialogue is muscular (or "salty", as Lynne Parker puts it) she was attracted to Ruohonen's lightness of touch. Parker, meanwhile, won't accept my contribution. "It ain't whimsical," she says, before adding with finality, "There is a sense of magic about it.

"And I think that there is a fairytale aspect - it involves a journey into the woods and a discovery - but that's much more about the Grimm Brothers than any kind of chocolate box notion. They discover, through a growing friendship, a great warmth and sense of security in the context of a very dangerous world." As her performers circle the rehearsal room against arresting new music from Bell Helicopter, I get a sense of that magic. On stage, in this imagined Finnish winter, we could be inside a snow dome.

Likewise, those glittering elements of the play - an ambiguous love story, a generational transfusion, the tango between history and future, progress and culture - are thrown up, swirling gently around the tangible naturalism of dialogue before gradually settling into an audience's mind.

"There's a sense of space and light that you get in Finland," says the usually phlegmatic Parker, "the extraordinary expanse of whiteness, punctuated with strong nuggets of vibrant colour, where you can see the humanity cluster. And that's what I find so wonderful and attractive about it." Certain things, as McLean agrees, get lost in translation, however, and one of Ruohonen's scenes is conspicuous by its absence. Parker has cut an absurd interlude scene, as she did in Edinburgh, in which the drama is halted to allow the Finnish Antique Dealers' Association's Male Quartet to perform The Jam Cantata, a reductio ad absurdum of the tropes of Finnish nationalism. "In theatre, I like that stepping out of the straight line," Ruohonen tells me.

"That's a Finnish joke that doesn't translate," says Parker with jovial diplomacy. "Berries mean something in Finland that we do not understand." In McLean's translation it became a hymn to shortbread. But the amusement in Lynne Parker's voice grows. "You have to draw a line," she concludes, and finally she laughs out loud.

• Olga opens at the Project theatre tomorrow and runs until November 29th