HS Culture 15.5.2001 - Who killed the groom? Who's got the script? Role-playing in the vicarage

By Sirpa Pääkkönen in Kuhmalahti

In the midst of the engagement party waltz, the bridegroom-to-be slumps to the floor. "He's dead", pronounces the pharmacist. A buzz of confused chatter runs through the guests. The groom has been poisoned! One of those present is a murderer, but who is the culprit?

I am in the village of Kuhmalahti, around 50 kilometres east of Tampere, and I am taking part in a production of Murder in the Vicarage, presented appropriately enough in a former vicarage that has now been turned into the venue for an annual summer art exhibition.

The owner of the "atelier vicarage" is one Teemu Luoto, a ceramic artist. Luoto came up with the idea of inviting the local villagers and others to take part in a theatrical game, in which they try to get inside the world of the whodunit through role-playing. With the exception of a couple of photographers called in to immortalise things, all of the 20 or so party guests at the vicarage are "actors" in the story, set in a 1930s vicarage milieu.

There is no director

, and no audience as such. Roughly a week before the Saturday performance, the players receive a draft synopsis that runs to a couple of typed pages and explains the situation from which the drama is to take off. The rest is improvisation. Only a handful of those taking part know the twists and turns of the plot and the identity of the murderer.

The idea was worked up in Kuhmalahti over the space of a couple of months. Aside from Teemu Luoto himself, the planning and scriptwriting team included headmaster Seppo Rinne from the local comprehensive school, doctor Suvi Puronen , and local artisan Anne Kallio.

More roles were added along the way as people from Kuhmalahti and neighbouring Sahalahti showed an interest in the project. Among my fellow guests at the tragic engagement party are the Kuhmalahti librarian, the editor of the local paper, the municipal secretary, a lawyer, a couple of teachers, and some pensioners.

I'm cast to play the elderly widow

of the dean. It's not a key role. According to my brief character description I'm a rather haughty sort of person with a somewhat strained relationship with the new dean's wife. I prepare myself by running over in my mind images of women from the Niskavuori plays by Hella Wuolijoki. A dean's wife really ought to be an upright sort but be superior and critical of all around her, I decide.

The players are invited to arrive at the vicarage about half an hour before the proceedings are due to start. Outside in the yard a group of people are milling around, dressed up in party gear from the 1930s, and some of them are extremely nervous.

There's a big risk to something like this. The estimated duration of about four hours seems pretty massive. Are we going to have enough to say to each other for the whole four hours, or will there be dead bits, or will the conversation turn into a porridge of everyone speaking at once and saying nothing in particular? Pulling off a role-playing exercise of this sort depends to a great extent on listening carefully to the unrehearsed lines of the others and responding to them.

The vicarage's attractive old dining room

certainly sets the right tone for the play. There's a large decorated table with place-settings, around which most of the action takes place. We sit at the table to drink our engagement party coffees and there's even a dinner scene with real food.

The roles seem to fit the players astonishingly well. Seppo Rinne takes the reins as the dean (not my dean, of course) and has us all singing a hymn. It probably comes fairly naturally to him as it transpires that he also teaches religion at the school. He reads a bit of scripture suitable for the occasion, and then raises a toast to the happy couple-to-be.

Since we are supposed to be doing all this during the Prohibition era of the 1930s, champagne is off-limits and we toast with chilled home-made mead.

Four or five of the participants

emerge naturally from the cast as the major protagonists. The remainder of us form an audience, with the difference that we aren't actually separated from the stage by any footlights. We seem to know our place in the chorus line.

There are a number of cameo roles, including a flirtatious surprise guest from America and the angelic (and adopted) daughter of the dean and his wife. The pharmacist, whose role turns out to be quite important, is initially seen as one of those two-faced figures of the Prohibition era, full of support for temperance but perfectly prepared to pass the hip-flask or write out a prescription for "medicinal spirits" for his friends. There's even a comic character thrown in for light relief.

The conversation stays in character, sticking to 1930s themes. Lines are delivered without slipping into modern lazy idiom, but it all comes across as fairly natural. There is mercifully not too much by way of gross theatricality and hamming, even though the atmosphere often resembles those old Finnish films from the period.

Basically the plot

is not worth going into and it is not very exciting. What is more important is getting inside the action and keeping up a role. The play does not generate the same sort of experiences one gets from a detective novel, where the reader wonders throughout who was responsible for the crime.

In the end, the dénouement is very traditional. About the only sharp twist comes when it is revealed that the pharmacist has made a snap diagnosis and got it wrong.

The groom isn't dead after all, but is deeply unconscious as a result of the sleeping-draught slipped into the mead. He's grabbed the wrong glass anyway and is not even the intended victim, and there are a number of suspects - with unrequited love and hushing up family secrets (that adopted daughter!) both figuring among the motives.

When the four hours is up

, there is a general sense of satisfaction among the participants. During the dinner scene the show began to drag a little and the conversation was close to drying up, but all in all the role-playing drama held together.

And neither the butler nor the detective did it.

Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 8.5.2001