The cast and crew of English language play Habeas Corpus are rehearsing at Nuku’s Pikku Sali theatre, on the second floor of the building off Hallituskatu. An actress is ill so I’ve arrived late. Mark Smith, the English director, is a wiry young Oxford University graduate with ginger hair and seems determined. He pops his head out of the door, asking me to wait. From the door you can hear the echoes of a play winding down. Minutes later, I’m invited into a room with a three-tier gallery, a low ceiling, and a stage the size of a small classroom. The set consists of three wooden chairs. Seven or eight Finns, judging from their expressions of obedient concentration, stand around and wait for Smith to deliver his notes.

He hasn’t much to say: a good sign with a few days to the first performance. Only a few hiccups in pronunciation break the silence – a few awkward entrances and exits from the stage, a faulty line or two. He consults with a technician behind a mixing desk in the corner about lighting, then announces me as the press. I wave weakly, and he orders the actors to change into costume for a run-through of the first act. Someone breaks out with a joke. “How far will we go?” It’s Matti Mäkelä, the lead, playing Doctor Arthur Wickstead MD, bored with his wife and marriage.

“All the way,” answers his director. “Well, I need to change my underpants then,” says Lauri Sallamo, alias Sir Percy Shorter, president of the British Medical Association. They leave in various directions. Mark thumbs his clipboard, looking in ten directions. Five minutes later we’re waiting for Maija Huhtinen. Huhtinen, Smith’s girlfriend in real life, plays Mrs Swabb, lumpy cleaner and know-it-all moral commentator. “You ready back stage?” her director calls, sticking his head into the corridor. “No,” he announces, “she’s still padding up. Well, Matti’s going to blabber on for a minute, anyway.”

This is typical of the group: formal and informal in fits, funny and serious in turns. It’s also good news for their audience. The cast speak clear, consistent English, punctuated with the odd exchange in Finnish, under their breath.

Alan Bennett, described alternatively as a ‘curmudgeon’ and the greatest living English playwright, is the originator of Habeas Corpus. This is a sex farce about hanky-panky, canoodling, and a pair of fake breasts. It’s inhabited by a doctor who’s seen 25,000 sets of private parts, and a ‘thrusting young vicar’ called Canon Throbbing.  It’s also, seriously, about death, the body, repression, and middle-class sixties England. Mäkelä’s Doctor Wickstead leans over a patient to the audience. “He’s not going to die,” he confides darkly, dripping with cynicism.

Habeas Corpus balances rumblings of mortality with flatulent English sexuality. Its selfish middle-class characters lust after the human body one minute, and despise it the next. Huhtinen’s Mrs Swabb chews up and spits out their faults. With the sensitivity of a broom handle, she herds people from the room with a brisk ‘hoover, hoover,’ and cheeks them with questions like “have you any boyfriends?” In reply, Heidi Tihveräinen, playing Connie the spinster Wickstead, stares wistfully at her own small breasts.

All this is, like Brigitte Bardot, hugely entertaining. The actors almost-trip over an odd word here and there, like the proverbial banana, and can be seen thinking sometimes about their entrances and exits from the stage. But these hardly qualify as distractions. They actually compliment the sparse set and solidify the dialogue. More importantly, relationships pop and sizzle through the lines. I’m hooked. As the only audience member, I try not to applaud showily, and have difficulty not laughing too loud.

My private viewing ends as Jarkko Iisakka as Canon Throbbing throws himself on Connie Wicksteed like a wet rag to a chip pan. Like the canon, I’m sorry to see it end. Smith makes a short speech thanking everyone, and asks whether I could understand everything. I say yes, practically unequivocally. “Remember where you had problems?” he asks, half-joking. I ask whether those actors that don’t have to rush off mightn’t chat about the play.

Meeting the actors

So what turns you on about acting? Collective smiles. Mäkelä, the doctor, loves “the smell of makeup and the heat of the spotlights, the sweat dripping.”  Ulla Vuoteenaho, who plays passion-starved wife Wicksteed, loves the feeling of having people laugh at her. “There’s nothing like it, really,” she says. Others say what’s best is improving vocal output, the overall challenge, the buzz of being on stage, or being part of the group.

Taking advantage of Smith’s absence, I ask what he’s like.  ‘Relaxed,’ they answer, ‘– a peaceful dictator.’ As if to prove the point, he appears miraculously, holding his scripts. ‘Oy oy,’ he pipes in a pretend cockney accent, ‘stop dishing the dirt.’ This company are obviously good friends. Mäkelä is quick to admit as much and Emilia Hautamäki, another long-standing team member, adds “for me they’re the only friends I’ve met in university other than people I already know.”

So why Habeas Corpus? Apart from the obvious, drama societies like the play, Smith explains, because there’s no set, and groups like this have to take care of all the props themselves. This is his second English language direction in Oulu, and the second comedy for most of the actors. The first was Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle, whose Viennesse shopkeeper Zangler remarks, “one false move and we could have a farce on our hands.”  But this, they feel, is more farce than before. “Razzle was very very innocent; no sexual tension. It’s kind of we want to find ladies but wouldn’t know what to do with them if we did. This is more of a farce in that trousers fall. People get slapped.”

Have you consciously adapted the play to an Oulu audience; for instance, have you worked on accents?  “I haven’t done dialect coaching,” says Smith. “Just the odd word. Sometimes there’s a tendency to American pronunciation. Sometimes I have to remind people to say ‘aawfternoon,’ to be posh.” They’ve made some cuts: a satire of an English war poem, for instance, was left out. But generally, Smith assures, it’s a period piece. “This has not been transposed to another culture.”

Surely Finnish humour and English humour differ, though? “This has definitely been the funniest play I’ve ever done,” exclaims Ulla Vuolteenaho.  “The dialogue is so brilliant. We’ve been laughing at the same scenes for months and they’re still funny.”  Maija Huhtinen breaks in, calling Corpus humour ‘‘cheeky cheeky.”  “In Finnish,” she continues, “it’s more like, woman, take off your clothes.” Oulu audiences, she says, are very responsive to English humour. Says Vuolteenaho, “in On the Razzle, when there were people in the audience who had the courage to start laughing, people would start laughing towards the end more and more.”

But also it’s not a riotous comedy from the outset, promises Smith. Audiences, they hope, can expect a range of emotions with this play. “Every character,” says Mäkelä, “has some sort of a turning point. Hopefully the play will provoke thoughts. Sex is hopefully a part of life and death is definitely a part of life.” Huhtinen’s sales pitch is shorter. “To friends who study I’ve said “lots of breasts” and it worked.” 

Habeus Corpus is showing at Nuku Pikku Sali on May 28^th at 12.00, May 31^st at 19.30, and June 1^st at 19.30.  Tickets cost 4€ for adults and 2€ for students, and can be pre-booked by emailing This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it