Teede hopes 1960s student play sparks young audiences

Playwright Andra Teede hopes her new production about students at the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute in the late 1960s will inspire young audiences today, ERR reported.

“Nüüd õpin Mustamäel” premiered on Thursday in TalTech’s courtyard. Teede wrote the play, while actor Egon Nuter is also part of the cast.

Teede said she finds it more interesting to write about people who are not artists or humanities specialists. Her previous subjects have included builders and factory workers, and the new play focuses on engineers, higher-education students and employees.

“The world is full of novels about novelists and plays about actors and making theatre. I have always swum against that current,” Teede said on Vikerraadio’s “Vikerhommik” programme.

The play is set at the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute at the end of the 1960s. Teede described the institute as a “good aquarium” where everyone is together and unable to escape.

The story combines the personal experiences of young people who fall in love, learn about life and clash with one another with broader themes, including Soviet-era confrontation, the conflict between spirit and power, and the limits placed on scientists.

Teede said the subject was particularly interesting because it had not yet been explored in this way.

Nuter has a personal connection to the institute. After finishing secondary school, he worked there for three years after failing a mathematics examination prevented him from pursuing other opportunities. He initially studied mechanical engineering, but later abandoned it.

He worked in the institute’s technical teaching aids service, obtained qualifications as a narrow-film projector operator and later worked in the language laboratory.

Nuter said he partly joined the production for nostalgic reasons. He recalled the birth and first performances of rock bands in the institute’s assembly hall, including Mess, In Spe, Ornament and Rock Hotel, as well as film-club screenings organised there.

To write the play, Teede interviewed people who had studied at the institute in the 1960s. She said their memories of the period were ambivalent: many recalled their youth and the decade as a time when they were free and could do what they wanted.

However, when she asked more specific questions, she found that they had not in fact been free. Teede said an entire department at the university was under KGB control and that every step was restricted.

The play examines whether the young people feel they are fighting against something. Its protagonist is a fictional country boy from Rapla who comes to study in the capital.

Teede said she wanted to show how the boy, whose mother had told him nothing, genuinely believes they are living in a beautiful Russian state. After joining slightly older and more courageous students, he gradually begins to see things differently and think more critically about the system.

Nuter plays two roles: a respected lecturer in the present day and the university rector in the past. He said the rector’s position was also difficult because party and KGB control remained in place, even if the rector had personal views of his own.

He added that it was understandable that some people knew nothing about the past at home, as parents wanted to protect their children and speak to them only once they were old enough to understand.