Renate Keerd’s Draama style challenges audiences

In a festival diary published by ERR, Tartu University theatre studies students discuss the Draama festival’s third day, including the presentation of Teatrielu 2025 and Renate Keerd’s production The Sun Does Not Shine at Night.

The day began with the presentation of Teatrielu 2025. The familiar publication has been given a makeover, with pink covers and an eye-catching design. Statistics presented at the event showed that Estonia recorded enough theatre visits last year to equal the country’s entire population, although that does not mean every Estonian attended the theatre.

The students praised the young editors, who had taken responsibility for renewing the publication while maintaining a clear vision. One of the new edition’s main aims is to reach a wider audience and make the large-format publication more engaging and accessible online. Discussions also highlighted the theatre community’s desire for more varied forms of writing and new perspectives.

The diary also reflects on Mart Kangro’s Medium. One of the students attended its English-language performance after the other had seen the Estonian version the previous day. The students said that, with a good translation, the production’s jokes and wordplay reached the foreign-language audience equally well.

In the post-show discussion, participants described Kangro’s art as lively and difficult to contain within the boundaries of text. They also emphasised that the physical body is more reliable than technology. The students said the production was worth the experience of exploring the depths of the internet during its creation.

Later, they walked home from Tartu New Theatre after seeing Keerd’s The Sun Does Not Shine at Night. The students found the production difficult to assess at first, saying that while Medium felt like a good introduction to the world of performance art, Keerd’s style was “for advanced audiences.”

The production’s cartoon-like, playful action kept the audience focused, while its wordplay also worked in the English translation and frequently prompted laughter. Foreign visitors heard well-known Estonian music, including Arvo Pärt’s Lullaby and Push Up’s Spider-Man.

Keerd’s twists were unpredictable but enriched by familiar elements and varying repetitions. Among the festival productions seen so far, many of which dealt with harsh subjects, this one felt light and fresh. The strongest emotions came from a scene involving smartphones, which the students found deliberately plain. After the dreamlike atmosphere of the rest of the production, the glowing screens and zombie-like humming broke the theatrical bubble and brought reality back into view.

The students said they left the production inspired by the idea of a functional wardrobe in which every item of clothing is individual and can be combined with the others.