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Dramaturgy of Desire, Ethics of Illusion in Kristian

Smeds's Mr Vertigo
Hana Worthen
Published online: 20 Aug 2012.

To cite this article: Hana Worthen (2012) Dramaturgy of Desire, Ethics of Illusion in Kristian Smeds's Mr Vertigo ,
Contemporary Theatre Review, 22:3, 400-411, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2012.690740

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 400
Dramaturgy of Desire, Ethics of Illusion in
Kristian Smeds’s Mr Vertigo1
Hana Worthen
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Kristian Smeds’s theatre work – for institutional
stages, experimental and site-specific spaces – is
tantamount with conceptual and aesthetic volati-
lity. In their visual and associative excess, his
productions follow a discursive, postdramatic logic
suspending and reframing the boundary between
the onstage and the offstage, between the
fictitious and the real. Throughout his career,
Smeds (born in Finland in 1970) has explored the
ethics of both stage illusion and the public desire
for it, blending a complex range of performance
styles and instruments – neo-naturalist mise en
scene with postdramatic elements, theatre, music,
video – into a vivid theatre of social and aesthetic
inquiry. After studying Dramaturgy at the Helsinki
Theatre Academy, in 1996 Smeds founded and
directed Helsinki Theatre Takomo, before moving
to far northern Finland to lead the Kajaani City
Theatre from 2001–04. There, he continued to
gain national and international recognition for his
development of new work alert to this theatre’s
regional and geopolitical situation, notably for his
Huutavan ääni korvessa (A Cry in the Wilderness,
2001), for his innovative use of new technology in
treating the classics, especially Chekhov’s Three
Sisters (2004), and for his rock music event,
Büchner’s Woyzeck (2003), which invigorated the
theatre for new audiences. Since leaving Kajaani,
Smeds has frequently worked in the Baltic
countries, attentive to the interplay between the
audience, the stage, and the world beyond it; his
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version of Chekhov’s The Seagull – Kajakas
(2007) for the Von Krahl Theatre in Tallinn,
Estonia, for example, was imagined as a bringing
together of, and a discourse between, two gen-
erations of Estonian actors.
An approach to the locality of performance
continues to sustain his work with the Smeds
Ensemble, founded in 2007.1 Layering the repre-
sentative/representational function of theatre and
the arts into the conceptual immediacy of the
performance, Smeds’s adaptation of the popular
Finnish wartime epic Tuntematon sotilas (The
Unknown Soldier) for the Finnish National Theatre
in 2007 made dynamic use of historical and recent
events, political figures, cultural icons, and the
theatre itself to interrogate the implication of
theatre in the reproduction of national mythology.
His dark comedy Mental Finland, produced for the
Royal Flemish Theatre in 2009, staged a different
yet related inquiry into the cultural tropes of
Finnish identity – bandy, Santa Claus, the sauna –
and their fortunes in a globalizing world, figured in
part by the cultural dominion of the EU, cast
here as a corps-de-ballet with riot shields (see
1. The Smeds Ensemble, which understands itself as ‘an
international and networking theatre group’, has three
permanent members: Kristian Smeds, who also serves as the
Artistic Director, Executive Director and video artist Ville
Hyvönen, and Producer Eeva Bergroth. On the Smeds
Ensemble, see 5http://smedsensemble.fi/4 [accessed 24
July 2011].

Image 1). His performance-happening Cherry
Orchard, devised between 2008–10 in Vilnius,
was performed for a small audience in Lithuania
and streamed as a video installation created by
Ville Hyvönen and Lennart Laberenz to festivals
throughout Europe; invited to the Wiener
Festwochen 2011, it was reconceptualized as
Vyšniu sodas – Der Kirschgarten, partly set in an
immigrant community on the edge of Vienna,
addressing the condition and treatment of refugees
in Austria, and Europe, today. In these works and
others, Smeds has foregrounded the use of
performance as an instrument for exploring the
contemporary contours of nostalgia and desire: the
secure pieties of nationalism, the comforting
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structures of history, the standardized relations of
theatrical performance.
In his 2010 Mr Vertigo, a piece for the main
stage of the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki
based on Paul Auster’s 1994 novel of the same
name, Smeds interrogates the ideology of theatrical
illusion itself, its implication in the construction of
social reality in and out of the performance, taking
Image 1 One of the inhabitants of the Mental Finland cargo container encounters the forces of Europe, a corps-de-ballet
with riot shields. Mental Finland premiered at the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels in 2009: photo: Bart Grietens,
courtesy of the Smeds Ensemble.
401
CTR DOCUMENTS
the contemporary postdramatic undoing of con-
ventional theatrical relations – of space, of power,
of representation – as a point of departure. Using
the magic show of Auster’s novel as a framework,
FORUM
Smeds develops a ‘positional’ critique of the
lusciousness of visual stage illusion, particularly in
the realistic/naturalistic theatre: his mise en scene
attends to the ways theatrical illusion is produced
through the regimen of training, the discipline of
the performers, and the location of the viewing
audience, recognizing that the power of the
performance to foster the paradoxical reality of
illusion depends both on the audience’s desire to
see and its location in the spectacle. Reflecting on
the theatre’s reciprocal shaping of the world it
inhabits, in part by dialectizing the audience’s
desire for illusion, a desire that oscillates between
the moral and ethico-political dimensions of the
stage, Mr Vertigo takes up the formal attributes of
‘postdramatic theatre’, notably the effort to place
the spectator at the centre of the event: the
boundary of the proscenium gains a powerful
conceptual leverage. Although Mr Vertigo is not
 402
as openly controversial as Smeds’s previous produc-
tions have been (particularly The Unknown Soldier),
it does depend precisely on a provocative critique of
stage realism: the notion that the decorous
epistemological privilege of the audience – seated
in the dark, apparently undefined by the fictive
spectacle it observes, interprets (and, of course,
pays to see) – both produces and is produced by the
proscenium and the characteristic illusions of
realism, all those mises en scene in which the way
of the world takes its ‘natural’ representation, a
world in which ‘freedom’ (like the ‘freedom’ of the
spectator) is governed by the absent authority of
‘society’, the ideologies that sustain the illusion of
its absence from the scene. In Mr Vertigo, the
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audience moves back and forth beneath the
proscenium arch; where the ‘perspective theatre
[. . .] offered an internally coherent and unified
spectacle to a single and unified point of view which
was outside the autonomous world of the fiction’,
Mr Vertigo insists on the structuring power of
illusion in framing the notion of the real.2 That is,
rather than merely resisting or dispensing with the
‘dramatic theatre’, Smeds uses the material, cultur-
al, and symbolic structure of the Finnish National
Theatre – an icon both of late nineteenth-century
realism, of its characteristic mode of theatricality,
and of the role of theatre in making and reflecting
cultural hegemony – to locate a dialectical critique
of theatrical illusion between the dramatic and
postdramatic stage.
Smeds’s mise en scene for Mr Vertigo has three
interlocking dimensions I would like to explore. First,
I engage Smeds’s use of the audience as an element of
the mise en scene, and how its occupation of
theatrical space create a series of interpretive oppor-
tunities. Then, I consider the ways Smeds brings an
external social and cultural reality to bear on the
performance, notably the production’s positioning of
its final, climactic ‘illusion’, one of the enchanting
‘magic’ tricks the audience expects to see in the
evening. Relating Smeds’s work here to his more
overtly critical interrogation of the uses of theatrical
representation in the fashioning of national and
cultural identity, I conclude by reflecting on the
ethical relation between realistic/naturalistic/neo-
naturalistic illusion and the reality it represents and
engages.
Mr Vertigo’s audience attends precisely to the
power of the stage, for the National Theatre
publicity promised ‘a magical adventure of the
2. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and
Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen,
1985), p. 25.
CTR FORUM
1920s world of illusion and show business’.3
Refiguring Auster’s plot as a series of retrospective
‘visual ecstasies of imagination’,4 Mr Vertigo
follows Walt (Tero Jartti), a street boy from St
Louis, taken into a powerful magician’s, Master
Yehudi’s (Jukka-Pekka Palo), tutelage (see Image
2). Recognizing Walt’s innate ability to levitate, the
Master’s mysterious and savagely violent instruc-
tion transforms him into the flying Wonder Boy,
the astonishing headliner of a vaudeville show
touring small and large towns across 1920s
America. Walt succeeds and Walt declines, as he is
beset both by Master Yehudi’s appropriation of
‘his’ dream and by a disease afflicting levitators on
the eve of the Great Depression; in the finale,
though, he is at last seen to levitate before our rapt
gaze. This concluding moment, a stunning coup de
thêàtre – Walt the Wonder Boy airborne over the
empty, uncanny auditorium of the Finnish National
Theatre, then disappearing as an elegant black
silhouette into an ethereal light, a void in the void
so to speak – materializes the theatre’s productive
dependence on the audience’s desire to be
deceived, to be satisfied by an enigmatic, evanes-
cent image. Using the proscenium as ‘a beginning
and a point of departure, not a sign of transition/
copying’,5 the conceptual and aesthetic mise en
scene of Mr Vertigo inquires into the dialectics of
the stage, an illusion machine whose reveries
depend on their distinction from, and dependence
on, the real.
As Hans-Thies Lehmann implies, the ‘postdra-
matic’ is perhaps best understood not in chron-
ological terms but conceptually, as a remapping of
the often binaristic logic (actor/character, actor/
spectator, text/performance, and so on) of con-
ventional dramatic theatre. On the one hand,
Smeds’s Mr Vertigo is dramaturgically conceptua-
lized within the postdramatic spectacle: the specta-
tor is displaced from her conventional plush seat
outside the action, and instead moved through the
theatre, on and off stage as an active part of Mr
Vertigo’s sensory mise en scene. Rather than
imitating or representing a fictive, narrative else-
where, the mise en scene co-ordinates a kaleido-
scopic visual dramaturgy that takes place here and
now, in the time and space it shares with us, the
audience. On the other hand, though, within the
3. Kansallisteatteri. Suomen Kansallisteatterin lehti (National
Theatre. The Magazine of the Finnish National Theatre), 2
(2010), 2–31 (p. 6).
4. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. by Karen
Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p.
117.
5. Ibid., p. 32.

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Image 2 Walt the Wonder Boy (Tero Jartti) in the theatre of light and darkness, the theatre of illusion: photo: Ville
Hyvönen.
postdramatic shift from showing a theatrical work
to concocting an immediate event, Smeds’s en-
gagement with the distinctive theatrical optics of
the magic show seems to raise, at least provision-
ally, a line of inquiry both into the fate of theatre,
and about the desire for its specific kind of illusion,
in the postdramatic era. Smeds’s Mr Vertigo at once
invokes and distantiates a principle of ‘realistic’
theatrical mimesis, which as Catherine Belsey has
noted, is ‘plausible not because it reflects the world,
but because it is constructed out of what is
(discursively) familiar’, in order to reproduce the
world and the viewing subject’s role in its
reproduction.6 Smeds’s production works at once
to construct a ‘postdramatic’ spectacle which
nonetheless internalizes, depends on, and alienates
the conventionalized relations and positionalities of
6. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen,
1980), p. 47.
403
CTR DOCUMENTS
FORUM
the modern ‘dramatic’ theatre and the work of
dramatic illusion it creates, the familiar ‘magic’ of
the stage in the disguise of the ‘real’.
Ironically aligned with Master Yehudi, Smeds
exploits the audience’s longing for theatrical
illusion, at once arousing, fulfilling, and frustrating
the desire to be charmed by his splendid artistry.
Taking only 200 spectators into the 700-seat main
auditorium of the Finnish National Theatre, he
conceptualizes the audience’s spatial performance,
displacing the traditional location of spectatorial
desire embodied in the conventional architecture of
western theatres, the ‘scenic theatre’, in which the
spectating subject ‘is held in place by
the spectacle’.7 Assembling in the lobby, the
audience is led through side doors into
the empty, dimly lit auditorium, up onto the stage,
and through a small opening in the fire curtain, to
7. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 25.
 404
bleacher seats on the stage turntable. Massed centre
stage, the audience’s critical exchange of perception
and perspective is already underway, as it shares the
confined space of play with the actors. Master
Yehudi enters, commanding the spectators to
silence their cell-phones, and the technicians to
prepare the scene; then, a prolonged moment of
darkness and silence. Suddenly, a low rumble
vibrates through us as the turntable begins to turn;
in distinction to the notional ‘absence’ of the
realistic theatre spectator, in this performance, our
physical, corporeal reality is sensibly at stake. Seated
on the turntable, the audience revolves to the
unsettling music of a fine onstage jazz trio (Verneri
Pohjola, Aki Rissanen, Joonas Riippa), while stage-
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hands light candelabras, mysteriously illuminating a
backstage playing area arrayed like stations of the
cross: a shabby theatre dressing room; a dark recess
with a cryptic figure in a white boxing robe, an
oversized W taped to his back; a stage dungeon
with a corseted dominatrix. In the cultural temple
of the Finnish National Theatre, the audience is
drawn beyond the curtain, to the dark side of the
sacred veil where the illusions are forged. Here,
seated centre stage on the theatre’s revolving
Image 3 Walt (Tero Jartti) climbing his Golgotha, from the production in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where Smeds
received the XII Europe Prize New Theatrical Realities in April 2011: photo: Ville Hyvönen.
CTR FORUM
turntable, the audience occupies the crucible where
images are shaped, the theatre’s factory of fantasy.
A series of vignettes stage the horrific physical and
emotional means Master Yehudi uses to discipline
Walt’s imposed dream of flight. In one of them, a
Christ-like Walt bears a yoke and water buckets, his
journey recalling a baroque processional; as he
moves forward through his suffering toward re-
demption, the audience rotates with him, silent
witnesses within his procession (see Image 3). Walt
climbs the bleachers to his own Golgotha, collapsing
in exhaustion. Next, trussed to a stick like a dead
deer, he is carried to the dressing-room. He tries to
flee being remade in Master Yehudi’s image, but all
exits are blocked. As Master Yehudi puts it, this is
Walt’s ‘welcome to the theatre’, and ours as well.
Smeds’s materialization of religious imagery is
less about veneration than about what Erich
Auerbach called a Christian ‘creatural realism’,
‘an aspect of Christian anthropology’, which
‘emphasizes man’s subjection to suffering and
transitoriness’. For Auerbach, ‘creatural realism’
was a kind of retrograde development in the late
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in which ‘the will
to a theoretical comprehension of practical earthly

life was paralyzed by the various trends toward a
popular ecstaticism, by the ever more emotionally
realistic mysticism of the Passion, and the prevailing
form of piety which was increasingly degenerating
into superstition and fetishism’.8 But while in the
late Middle Ages, religious imagery devalued the
earthly existence of man, Smeds uses this imagery to
draw a comparison between the degenerate coer-
cion of the ideologies of eternal salvation and the
dynamics of contemporary ethico-societal restraints,
identifying the rationality of the modern world with
the cruelty of Christian anthropology. Indeed,
Smeds deploys a specifically theatrical performative
structure to reinforce this ‘creatural realism’. Shar-
ing the performance space with Walt, following him
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on his journey, we also in a sense recapitulate the
spatial, experiential, and epistemological dynamics
of medieval processual performance, and its char-
acteristic ‘radicalism of emotion and expression’,9 in
which the boundary between the everyday, secular
street and the represented, sacred events was
regularly, pointedly blurred. Replacing an Enlight-
enment model of rationalized space and individual
judgement (concretized in the architecture of the
proscenium theatre) with the ethos of a medieval
performance paradigm, Smeds’s mise en scene
seems to insist on our ethical complicity in the
brutal making of artistic illusion.
Smeds uses the disposition of the theatre to
represent and to channel desire and identification;
his design team – Pietu Pietiäinen (lighting), Ville
Hyvönen (acoustics and visuals), Kati Lukka (sceno-
graphy) – creates absorbing images, sometimes
dissolving them just before they can be fully seized
and enjoyed; what is denied to the spectator – the
absolute experience of the consummation of the
illusion – points to the spectators’ consumerized
desire. The conventional site of the audience’s
knowledge and fulfilment, its ‘imaginary plenti-
tude’,10 is, here, a magical void: at one point, the
curtain parts to music from Twin Peaks and the entire
empty auditorium begins to sway, suddenly shatter-
ing, breaking apart like glass – this visual trick feels
real, the illusion is perfect and fatal as well. Seated in
the illusory space of the stage, we observe our own
absence, our own death, the death of the audience,
the shattered emptiness of our ‘natural’ consumption
of theatrical illusion (see image 4).
During the intermission, the audience is released
into the theatre lobby, and eventually led for the
8. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature, trans. by Willard R. Trask (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 249.
9. Ibid., p. 258.
10. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 25.
405
CTR DOCUMENTS
second half of the performance not back on to the
stage, but into the plush auditorium. The experi-
ence of returning to our ‘natural’ seats is disorient-
ing, uncomfortable, even vertiginous: the small
FORUM
audience feels abandoned, scattered through the
ghostly auditorium. With a concert number by the
stage jazz band, the second act begins: A woman/
Lady Witherspoon (Kristiina Halttu) won by
Master Yehudi at cards tells how her husband
(Esa-Matti Long) committed suicide when Yehudi
came to claim her; he later left her. Lonely, she
invites the lonely audience to the stage, seating us
this time in a circle around the turntable, where we
observe a kind of poetic, stylized violence trans-
forming a quotidian dramatic triangle. Torn
between the Master and the dead husband, the
woman and his ghost perform a surrealistic combat,
lashing each other in spellbinding slow-motion
with invisible, audible whips while Master Yehudi
and the audience look on. The dialectic of Smeds’s
imagery simulates the contested desire of the
spectator: the aesthetic pleasure of a poetry
sustained by violence competes with a recoiling
from the repulsion of violence. As an allegory of the
realistic/naturalistic functions of illusions, this act
of poetic violence manifests the danger of the
beguiling totality of the stage image, requiring
theatrical seeing to be an act of seeing through. The
scene images the problematic visual gratification of
theatre, where an enthralling surface sustains and is
sustained by an aestheticized violence. The cogni-
tive dissonance between beauty and violence, is one
of the defining marks of Smeds’s dramaturgy, and
frames a specifically interminable visual pleasure, a
pleasure which his mise en scene continuously
estranges as it ‘activates the dynamic capacity of the
spectatorial gaze to produce processes, combinations
and rhythms on the basis of the data provided’11
within this imagery. In Smeds’s Mr Vertigo, archi-
tecture, space, time, the bodies of the performers –
actors and spectators – are suspended from their
conventional uses, physical and mental, oscillating
between their function as objects and subjects of an
inquiry they cannot easily disentangle, yet must live
through.
Mr Vertigo figures the audience in its mise en
scene as part of its critical aesthetic; it also positions
the theatre, and theatrical activity, within the order
of social life. One hallmark of Smeds’s theatre work
is its permeability, a permeability that extends and
complicates the typical realist metonymy; the out-
side, offstage, contemporary world is not merely a
point of reference – it bleeds into his productions,
11. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 157.
 406
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Image 4 The audience is reassembled onstage, seated around the turntable and gazing into the empty auditorium of
the Finnish National Theatre. On the left Kristiina Halttu in white; the central seated figure is legendary Finnish actress
Tea Ista: photo: Antti Ahonen.
whether they are occupied with violence or with
sideshow magic. Throughout the evening, Mr
Vertigo explicitly engages the performance with
the theatre’s role in the broader creation of cultural
reality, based in part on the cultural centrality of the
Finnish National Theatre. For a Finnish audience,
or for an audience conversant in Finnish culture,
the notion that theatrical ‘magic’ might ensue from
a ruthless breaking down of the actor’s resistance
calls to mind the theatrical and educational work of
the director Jouko Turkka in the 1970s–90s, to
whom the actor playing Master Yehudi bears a
striking – physical and psychic – resemblance.
Turkka’s educational work as the Professor of
Acting at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki in the
1980s and his controversial productions are em-
bedded in Finnish cultural memory; he is known
for an educational philosophy marked by a commit-
ment to training the actor’s courage, developing an
ability to exceed the limits of the self, and preparing
the energy to endanger or compromise personal
identity as a performer, for pushing his students
and actors to (and beyond) their physical and
psychological limits. A major figure on the cultural
CTR FORUM
landscape, Turkka conceptualized his work for both
theatre and television as challenging the ideological
limitations enforced by realistic ‘objectivity’; his
outrageous, yet highly disciplined approach to
performance was designed to resist a representation
that ‘depends not upon imitation or illusion or
information but upon inculcation’,12 and to use a
kind of theatrical excess to bring the oppressed,
unseen, or conventionally silenced realities of hu-
man life to the stage. At the same time as he has
been depicted by his former students as authoritar-
ian, imposing trials on the edge of physical and
mental violence, he is also characterized as a ‘guru’,
or ‘god’, attributes characterizing Master Yehudi as
well.13 Generating an oscillating mis-alignment
between Turkka and Master Yehudi, Smeds appears
12. I take this quotation from Nelson Goodman, Languages of
Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd edn
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 38.
13. For a documentary archive of interviews and videos with
and about the work of Jouko Turkka see ‘Jouko Turkka-
kriisejä ja kuohuntaa’ (Jouko Turkka—Crises and Turmoil),
5http://www.yle.fi/elavaarkisto/?s¼s&g¼4&ag¼25&t¼
1464 [accessed 14 June 2011].
 407

CTR DOCUMENTS
at once to extend and confirm Turkka’s critique of
the ideologically deadening redundancy and stan-
dardization of conventional theatre, while at the
same time recognizing the power of the appetite for

FORUM
theatrical illusion, and also posing the question of
the human cost of the discipline of artistic and social
performance. Evoking the binary of Turkka’s
cultural presence – didactic tyrant or artistic guru
– and layering it into the performance of Master
Yehudi, Smeds invokes this still-controversial figure
both to situate Mr Vertigo in the immediate context
of Finnish theatre, to bring the ethical dynamics of
illusion, realistic or otherwise, into focus, and to
underline (as Turkka has done in commenting on
his work), a similar commitment to using the mise
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en scene as a means of critical instigation. Indeed,

though Smeds’s current methods of working with
actors are based on mutual appreciation and
collaborative improvisation, he shares with Turkka
an interest in adapting familiar texts and the
(national) myths they often encode as a means to
interrogating the foundational illusions that sustain,
govern, and reproduce the social imaginary as the
social real.
The permeability of the performance to con-
temporary Finnish culture is not confined to Master
Yehudi; it informs the performance of several other
roles as well. For instance, the actress Tea Ista (b.
1932) dottily blends her personal artistic biography
into her monologue as Mother Sioux, creating a Image 5 Walt (Tero Jartti) accompanied by the stage-
self-consuming dialectic between the fictive Amer- hands of the National Theatre dressed as KOM Theatre
ican vaudevillian and the personal authority of the chorus. Throughout Mr Vertigo, Tero Jartti’s transcen-
dent – innocent and visceral – physicality is captivating:
famous actress, a living legend of the Finnish stage. photo: Antti Ahonen.
A characteristic of Smeds’s work is also visible here:
it is the collective memory and the collective
memorizing that his imagery calls to trial. Playing theatre’s political and (sometimes exploitative)
on the actress’s age, the audience’s affection for artistic geography.
her, and her own self-deprecating talent, the In other words, while animating and disturbing
performance at once summons her recollections the audience’s desire to exercise its conventional
and oddly undermines their realistic authority. position of empowered absence in the theatre,
Even the American Walt has a Finnish connection: ‘outside the autonomous world of the fiction’,
he announces to the audience that he had always Smeds’s Mr Vertigo variously interrogates the
wanted to dance a ballet on the stage of the Finnish experience of this autonomy, the projection of a
National Theatre, accompanied by a chorus from theatrical real that ‘has always been excluded but
the once leftist Helsinki KOM Theatre (see Image inevitably adheres to theatre’.14 Smeds promises his
5). In support, the stagehands form a chorus along potential spectators the magic of theatre, seeing
the proscenium, wearing KOM Theatre logo t- Walt fly, a ‘magic’ that seems to tip Martin Esslin’s
shirts; Walt appears in a tutu, and begins to dance ‘delicate balance between illusion and reality’.15
his dream. He performs within the represented For Mr Vertigo’s postdramatic dramaturgy of
fiction and in dialogue with the present audience, illusion is less about a balance between the real
an invented insertion into Auster’s plotline that –
slyly washed in a reddish light – sends up the
conservative connotations of the Finnish National 14. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 25; Lehmann, Postdramatic
Theatre, p. 101.
Theatre. Mr Vertigo explicitly takes place in cultural 15. Martin Esslin, An Anatomy of Drama (New York: Hill and
and theatrical history, placing itself on the Finnish Wang, 1981), p. 91.
 408
and the illusory than a dialectical inquiry into their
mutual – even undecidable – constitution, and
about consequences of our unremitting appetite to
be deceived through imagery we willingly take to
confirm our location in reality.
This dynamic is focused in the final moments of
the performance, which culminates in a ravishing
theatrical trick. The audience is invited from the
stage seats ringing the turntable, to crowd around
Master Yehudi as he describes his last moments of
life, perhaps asking us to atone for our own desires.
The curtains part: in the cavernous auditorium,
Walt levitates high in the air, with no visible means
of support beyond his white balloon, until,
silhouetted in bright lights, he disappears into the
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rear upper reaches of the house. The illusion
triggers a multiplicity of meanings, depending on
how we conceive our position in relation to it.
Although the audience observes from the space of
illusion, on the stage, Smeds’s magical final image is
nonetheless bounded by the reverse frame of the
proscenium; hovering in the bright light above the
empty auditorium, Walt seems nearly two-dimen-
sional, a dream icon for the onstage audience to
consume. Here, Smeds summons not the cultural
or political function, but the aesthetic structure of
the Finnish National Theatre into service. Smeds’s
ironically framed picture calls our own positionality
into question, as we are now observed onstage by
Walt: our theatricalized desire to see a spectacle is
now staged as the cause of his triumph, and of his
tormented life. In this sense, Smeds frames a
positional dialectic, in which the desire for illusion
seems to transpire not from a position of episte-
mological privilege, but from a position which is
itself within the illusion; in Smeds’s theatre, the
space of the real and the space of illusion are
ideologically reciprocal, defining and displacing one
another.
Our disposition in theatrical space as audience,
onstage or in the auditorium, is critical to the
conception of the performance. At the same time,
our performance, enacting the desire to see and to
consume theatrical illusion, is the means by which the
performance does its work: enforcing the sense that,
as ‘spectators’, we understand ourselves as both
creators and subjects of illusion, the absent observers
and onstage performers of the illusions we desire to
see, but only to see – not to take responsibility for.
The proscenium functions in this respect as well.
Throughout the evening, as we are seated onstage,
Walt exits through the closed curtain onto the ‘stage’
of the many vaudeville houses where he flies as the
Wonder Boy: the imaginary audiences, occupying
vaudeville theatres across the American Midwest
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(performed by the National Theatre auditorium so
to speak), repeatedly see Walt’s performances, but we
see only one, when he walks on water. For the most
part, we see his immense anxiety before each show,
and his pride in accomplishment when he returns to
us ‘backstage’. Smeds’s final image of Walt in
flight, then, satisfies our desire to see, the desire
for a fulfilling spectacle, denied throughout the
performance. In the end, we get what we came for,
but the performance suggests we get more than we
see: it insists on the recognition that the illusion
we desire is one we create, one we are accountable for,
in which we are willing to sacrifice Walt, and perhaps
traces of our own social reality, for the pleasure of self-
deception, in which we believe we are finding
ourselves on the stage of the illusory.
This final image, blurring the line between
fantasy and reason, contests the aesthetics of
realism that the production both invokes and
troubles. This last, impossible image of Walt exiting
into the world implies the use of theatrical illusion
to empower the spectator to see beyond the
perspectival relations licensed by the turn-of-the-
century house, to perceive beyond this image, to
hope; the image provides the potential means for
transforming reality, by breaking the grip of the
realistic totality. Counter to realistic themes and
aesthetics, we are subjected to imagery suggesting
that (childhood) fantasies and the utopian elements
of magic are false only insofar as we are governed by
the false utopias of realism and its innate Enlight-
enment instrumental rationality. The spectators’
longing to see Walt fly, to experience his airborne
state, points to the potentially liberating ‘irration-
ality’ audiences miss in the experience of realistic
theatre, a theatre that duplicates the familiar
ideological structure of the status quo. In one
sense, then, this fantastic image envisions a break
with the realistic principle that exploitatively governs
the spectator’s power of imagination. Walt drama-
tizes the regulatory limits of the realistic imagina-
tion, which shapes social reality in accord with its
own manipulative standards and purposes, reflecting
its own horizon of (manufactured) possibility. Walt’s
aerial image embodies the promise of an alternative
that rationalist history, and realism, have betrayed,
an alternative that requires remaking the architecture
of social mimesis.
This ultimate image takes place in the auditor-
ium, in the space of everyday social reality, the space
where the audience typically exercises its desire, but
which has now been evacuated: the image displaces
the real. And yet, we also observe the image, take it
in, from the space of performance, from within the
proscenium frame. But the perspective relations of

realism cannot simply be reversed: instead, the
notion of a social event uninflected by illusion,
ideology, itself appears as a delusion. As Smeds’s
incorporation of contemporary Finnish theatrical
and social reality suggests, the positional framing of
illusion, the frame-like boundary of a politicizing
proscenium so to speak, locates the practice of
theatre in relation to its surrounding society, and in
relation to the claims of national and increasingly
global cultures. The tension between the stage and
the house, how the space of illusion is framed/
unframed by its social ‘reality’, reciprocates an
analogous ethical dialectic, in which a fixed
structure of aesthetic representation – real social
spectators here, distinct illusion over there –
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sustains the structuring of the social and political
order. Theatre has an ethical dimension, produced
within a specific community’s conventions of value.
But Smeds’s Mr Vertigo suggests the challenge, the
global challenge of a postdramatic theatrical ethics
also witnessed in his Mental Finland and in The
Unknown Soldier (which I discuss below): the
American Walt both invades and finally overturns
the historical ethical/representational structure of
the Finnish National Theatre as he moves between
and belongs to diverse cultural and national
contexts, the USA and Finland, the 1920s Amer-
ican Midwest and Turkka’s theatre half a century
(and half a world) away, the past and present
Finnish National Theatre. Mr Vertigo, then, goes
beyond asserting the defining implication of the
real and the illusory; it dramatizes the constitutive
function of the frame, the boundary, the prosce-
nium, as an Althusserian ideological apparatus,
implying a more pervasive critique of the dynamics
of perspective, of representational distance defining
western theatre aesthetics. After all, the illusion
of the auditorium can be shattered, but the
proscenium, the auditorium, and their ability to
reconstitute the boundary between the real and the
illusion, remain in place.
Any national theatre has been historically pre-
determined to refract its imitations of national
identity, the illusions that locate the stage at the
symbolic centre of the nation, even of the world.
Mr Vertigo’s engagement with the politics of
illusion gains greater clarity in comparison with
Smeds’s Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier),
his 2007 production for the Finnish National
Theatre main stage.16 Restaging Finland’s World
16. See Hana Worthen, ‘‘‘Finland Is Dead, Dead Dead’’: Ethics
and National Identity in Kristian Smeds’s The Unknown
Soldier’, TDR: The Drama Review, 56:2 (T214, Summer
2012), pp. 34–55.
409
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War II struggle against the Soviet Union (1941–
44) from the perspective of ordinary soldiers, The
Unknown Soldier was also an adaptation, challen-
ging the fashioning of national identity by thea-
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tricalizing Finland’s best-known modern epics,
Väinö Linna’s 1954 novel, Tuntematon sotilas,
and Edvin Laine’s 1955 film version. In this sense,
Smeds used wartime history, its inscription in two
popular epics, in cultural and individual memory,
and in the social framework of the National Theatre
itself to undertake a critique of national identifica-
tion, of the changing understanding of Finnishness
in a globalizing society as it is performed by the
contemporary Finnish spectatorial subject.
Like Mr Vertigo, The Unknown Soldier directed a
postdramatic attention to the performative role of
the audience and its memory in the significance of
the event. Smeds’s mise en scene emphasized the
specifically ‘national’ character of this theatre, its
role in forging the problematic relationship be-
tween national and theatrical identification: the
theatre audience shared a moment of apocalypse as
the national trauma, the ‘death of Finland’, was
aestheticized in a landscape of present-day warfare,
an encounter with enemy-others and more sig-
nificantly with otherness (see Image 6). An
important element of Smeds’s critique was devel-
oped through casting: in addition to using wash-
ing-machines to play the Russian soldiers, he chose
an actor with a darker complexion and a dog – a
humorous literalization of one character’s name,
Susi, Finnish for ‘wolf’ – to play two Finnish
‘unknown soldiers’. While the dog was uncontro-
versial, the dark-yet-Finnish-born actor became a
fulcrum of controversy, a screen for the projection
of the racist ethics of national identity staged in the
temple of idealized national self-perception.
Smeds’s apparently eccentric casting forcefully
brought what Avishai Margalit describes as the
tension between the relational structure of ethics
and the abstract or essential attributes of morality
to the fore: ethics is ‘grounded in attributes such as
parent, friend, lover, fellow-countryman’, while
morality relies ‘on some aspects of being human’,
and so ‘encompasses all humanity’.17 In The
Unknown Soldier, the ethics of national identifica-
tion is sustained by the ongoing reiteration of a
trauma that has roots both in history and in fantasy:
the threat of the ‘death of Finland’ through its
encounter with enemy-others and with otherness.
While Mr Vertigo focuses more exclusively on
theatrical aesthetics, The Unknown Soldier also
17. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 7–8.
 410
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Image 6 The finale of Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier) with its wounded and bleeding Finnish flag, on the
main stage of the Finnish National Theatre: photo: Antti Ahonen.
dramatized the ‘aesthetic but therein at the same
time ethico-political’18 dimension of national
theatrical identification, through perfomative poli-
tics that were as multi-levelled, internally contra-
dictory, affectively and intellectually complex as
experience and performance themselves. Partially
effacing the division between spectator and actor, at
one point in The Unknown Soldier, the house lights
went up, and the soldiers moved through the
audience, bringing several women to dance with
them onstage. Partying with the audience, the
actor-soldiers’ performance stressed the continu-
ities with the present rather than a rupture with or a
simple revival of the wartime past; it also implied
that these foundational narratives of postwar
Finnishness continue to be inhabited by the social
spectators. Smeds used performance as a kind of
ritual, emphasizing the transformative potential of
the here-and-now of the event, drawing the
reserved spectators onto the stage, calling into
question the experience of the ethical and the
moral, the inside and the outside, palpably dialecti-
18. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, pp. 185–86.
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cized by national identification. The signal work of
The Unknown Soldier dislocated the passive author-
ity and illusory autonomy of the spectator as a
means to foregrounding the constructed character
of national identity, and proposed an alternative,
hybrid form of theatrical interplay. Like Mr
Vertigo, it urged a consideration of the reflexive
role of the proscenium in constructing the illusions
of national reality, and the acts of inclusion and
exclusion that illusive frontier enables us to per-
form.
While The Unknown Soldier developed a richly
experiential critique of the fictions sustaining the
illusion of national identity, Mr Vertigo focuses
more directly on the grounding function of
theatrical illusion in the construction and
ethical reproduction of social reality. Putting the
spectators onstage, the entire production locates
the audience within the dream, a site of fantasy and
aspiration, but also of delusion, disconnection, and
loss. In his effort to ‘balance’ the theatre’s
distinction between the illusion and the real, Esslin
takes the theatre’s constant projection of illusion
towards the spectator as ‘a perfect image of our

situation as human beings in this world’.19 Yet
while for Esslin the boundary of the proscenium
fixes the distinction between the illusion and the
real space from which we enact our desire for it, Mr
Vertigo moves the audience through a reimagined
spatiality, the ephemerality and materiality of
theatre redefining one another.
Mr Vertigo explores the undecidable interplay
between the desire for illusion and the reality it
reflexively constructs and inhabits, the perhaps
uncanny sense that the desire to see Walt fly
constructs each of us – as it constructs the National
Theatre – as the site where a rich and ideal significance
is realized, but realized as a hovering emptiness as
well. Smeds described his mise en scene for The
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Unknown Soldier as embodying the ‘end of the
fairytale state’; for him, ‘the fairytale state is gone’, a
comment that also applies, ironically, to Mr Verti-
go.20 Moving Auster’s narrative into the theatre,
Smeds’s dramaturgy of desire rewrites the function of
fiction: fiction is no longer a book, words we hold in
our hands, but something we ethically inhabit and
create, from the novel and from the venue itself. In
Smeds’s treatment, the stage transforms the novel’s
narrative into rapturous, affecting imagery, while
reconceiving our participation in that fiction: perfor-
mance creates not a mimesis of reality, but an
exposure of the desire for that mimesis. The audience
is offered an aesthetic process, yet invited to react
reflexively, alienating the unreflective certainty and
security of theatrical attention as an unproblematic
social behaviour, and perhaps even dramatizing
the moral dimension of postdramatic theatre, its
aesthetic reach towards concerns beyond the limits of
the ethical. Though the postdramatic aesthetic ‘leaves
behind the political style, the tendency towards
dogmatization, and the emphasis on the rational’,21
Mr Vertigo’s brilliant dreamscape reciprocally enables
a critique of the ethics sustaining theatre, of theatrical
illusion.
Rather than merely ‘staging plays’, Smeds has
subjected both dramatic and non-dramatic texts –
19. Esslin, An Anatomy of Drama, p. 94.
20. Discussion with Kristian Smeds at the Deutsches Haus,
Columbia University, New York, 1 December 2009.
21. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 33.
411
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Chekhov plays, Dostoevsky novels, Finland’s post-
war national epic – to significant theatrical re-
formation, reworking verbal and narrative elements
in order to position the spectator at the confluence of
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theatrical experience, whether directly (as when
actors invite the audience onstage in The Unknown
Soldier) or more indirectly (as when the unknown
soldiers advance on the stage from the rear of the
auditorium, a scene – capturing the actors and
spectators in a single image – also projected on a large
screen onstage). At the same time, while postdra-
matic theatre tends to position the spectator at the
centre of the event, Smeds’s Mr Vertigo culminates in
an image which can only be experienced, seen, as a
spectator, from a position across the threshold of
illusion. Offering an illusion of the real, the realistic
theatre necessarily positions its subject spectator to
receive it, be interpellated by it, master it, character-
istically from a position of apparent social and
epistemological privilege – outside and opposite
the ‘scene’ of fiction. While illusion is the
insincere means of (realistic) theatre, in Smeds’s
mise en scene the theatre becomes ‘authentic’,
dialectically unveiling its historical insincerity in
imagery that invites the spectator to see in a
sincere way and provides the opportunity to see
with an awareness of the ethical and moral
consequences of seeing through this form of
theatricality, in which the act and position of
vision is ideologically determined. If the duplicity
of realistic work originates in its illusion of power,
Smeds uses the optics of theatre to render that
deception visible, materializing the specific perfor-
mativity of realistic mimesis. In this sense, Smeds’s
postdramatic theatre both memorializes the thea-
tre of illusion and requires it, performs it, as a
means both to engage the familiar appetite for
theatre and to alienate it, to layer that desire into
a meticulous, ethical interrogation of the func-
tioning of the theatre as a material institution.
Foregrounding a dramaturgy of desire, Smeds’s
mise en scene dialectizes the ethics of illusion.