‘Rakkaudesta Sähköön’ (‘For The Love Of Electricity’) opened at the Finnish National Theatre on 20th March 2025. Here Aitor reflects on directing Marc Gassot and his creative team.

In 2019 Marc Gassot, a physical theatre performer from Finland approached me to direct a solo show for him. It was going to be played at the National Theatre and it was going to be properly funded and produced.

If I am completely honest, at first I did not remember who he was . . . He told me that he had met me in one of the first workshops I taught for Spymonkey. I had taught in Jyvaskyla at the festival there many years ago and I did not remember him clearly. I did remember someone that I had a fight with about being funny with skill or being funny with bad material . . . I do not think it was Marc.

At the end of the year we did some work, a week of R&D where we explored some of the things that they were interested in. I add my interests and we really started to work.

To work with people when you do not know whether they are good or bad is a problem most of the time. The endless possibilities of someone’s imagination start to get limits depending of the skill of the person who plays . . . That normally brings very good things but very bad things too. I prefer to work with people that I like. It inspires me to create great work and it excites me, the endless possibilities that that liking brings into the creative equation.

That is the reason why I did work with Spymonkey for all those years and now I work with Toby and Emily.

I have to admit I thought the pay was going to be good.

The week we worked at the end of 2019 it was a lot of fun. Marc is an amazing performer. He has an amazing physicality and he is a very good actor. For the show he wants to do he is going to have his partner on the stage, a musician called Karl Sinkkonen. They have been doing shows together for a while where they mix mime and music. The mime that they do is very provocative and grotesque and they have been quite successful and that is why the National Theatre of Finland has agreed to produce the show.

Suddenly in 2020, the middle ages pandemic happened so . . . everything is on hold. The show and many more in the entire world got stopped and many got not made like our “Apocalypse WOW!” and others got delayed. During the entire pandemic we keep the flame alive over Zoom and we add the idea of writing a concept album that will accompany the performance of Marc and Karle. A Progressive Rock that hopefully will bring to the show the words that the performer was not going to use.

The show gets delayed and a long back and forth starts between us and the Finish National Theatre, one that finished yesterday when the play opened to a sell out crowd.

There are many laughs and there will be even more laughs once the performer becomes comfortable playing the show in front of the audience. It is a show designed and built for Marc and he has to play it exactly with that spirit, the spirit of a solo performance. . .

Our idea is that while the mime is happening the music, more than just to accompany the performance, will be adding another layer to the story. As if the music would be a character in itself. So Karl writes a concept album about being lonely, about being old, about loosing, about being in love, which are the themes of the show.

The biggest question and challenge of the show was how to make the clown of Marc present while he makes mime and all the slapstick routines that he has in mind. When a performer has lots of skills is not very easy to get the stupid laughs of the clown because we see the skill and we as an audience look at the performer from below, we laugh at the jokes and we admire the skill.

So how to find his stupidity and let the audience know that they were allowed to laugh at the performer that is going through a terrible time? Marc’s character has decided to end his life after drinking two bottle of vodka.

We did lots of improvisations and we were very firm in recognising when the laughter was not there. Marc’s clown to everyone’s surprise started to appear little by little. It was this horrible, nasty, and hate-able person that did not like the audience but did like their love. He would be upset and angry that the audience was there but while was telling the audience to go, he would be doing things for them to laugh . . . A big contradictory character that when was working really well it was incredibly funny.

Like with everything Clown, the repetition of the laughter was the most difficult thing. To be every night and every time light, free, and playful for the material that we have been rehearsing and looking at for a long time it was very complicated.

The show was created in June 2024. For almost six weeks while the Finish National Theatre closed down for summer holidays, we inundated the small room with funny material and props and improvised and wrote a piece of theatre that had never ever been done before. The Finnish National Theatre was a playground for six weeks where we had a lot of fun. Marc, Karl, Tanja [Tanjalotta Räikkä, singer/performer], Susanna [Susanna Alcatul, assistant director] and I kept trying to find ways to integrate the clown, with the mime, with the slapstick and with the music and the singing.

The show, a ‘solo show’, now had a musician and a singer. So how to integrate those two performers in a satisfied way and still keeping the feel of a solo show?

With all those challenges in mind we arrived the end of June with the clear feeling that we had a show and we said that we will reconvene in Helsinki again in March 2025 for tech and opening the show.

On the 5th March I flew to Helsinki and I went straight to a rehearsal. The show had disappeared. It was a little bit scary. All the work done the year before was not there, the performers had not studied or kept alive the material that we created.

My bad for thinking that people with no experience in clown work were going to be able to do that.

So for the last two weeks and a half we had studied, remembered, rehearsed the show and wrote new bits of business to accommodate the technical aspects of the show and to put the show at the funny place that deserves to be and that we had imagined.

As part of those rehearsals we had some previews and it was very interesting how the show went from bad to the good state that opened yesterday.

For quite a while I thought that it was not going to happen. Marc is not what we will call a natural clown. He is an splendid actor and mime and his body does amazing things but he suffers with the unknown and with being very present in a comedic way.

Very often when you act in a piece of theatre you could not be there, you put the automatic pilot and the story will move you forward. . . It is not good but it happens sometimes and we the audience do not normally see it . . .but as a clown you need to be present, very present, in the moment, with the audience, and the story does not move you but you move it.

Arguably you could say that both are true for every piece of performance but the reality is that only the good shows have everything.

With Marc and with Tanya and Karl we worked a lot in being together and in the moment. To allow themselves to feel what they want to do in every single moment, or the same thing, to make what they have to do feels as if it is what they want to do. . . Marc and Karl and Tanja have a duo relationship on the stage thou they are three. Karl and Tanja play the role of the ‘straight’ clown for Mark. They are dress like clowns but they are the serious clown and that was difficult for them to understand.

Marc is ‘the idiot’, as we call the August clown, and the subject of the story. By the end of the show the three of them play very well together and they make the audience laugh and be moved by the terrible story that is happening on the stage. One that everybody understands very well in Finland but in my opinion one that the entire world is going through at the moment. The fear of the unknown.

In the best tradition of a clown that always say yes, when I was asked, would you know how to make a solo show with no words?, I as a clown, said, yes,yes,yes . . . Little did I know how to make anything but it was by being in the middle of that problem and with the help and complicity of the team of amazing creatives of Rakkaudesta Sähköön that made possible the birth of that show.

More about ‘Rakkaudesta Sähköön’ (‘For The Love Of Electricity’) on the Finnish National Theatre website