ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the reception by press and audience. The Finnish press is diverse and powerful, and thanks to Finland’s multi-party political system, both political and unaffiliated national newspapers were commonplace even up until the 1990s. In a similar way, all cultural departments at newspapers operated relatively independently and tended to function in a similar way to unaffiliated papers. Despite their importance as historical source material, the newspaper clippings are nonetheless individual pieces of recorded history. Nevertheless, combining these texts with audience statistics unveils contemporary theatrical conventions and expectations. Along with a few National Theatre and general Finnish audience surveys, a more exact analysis of how the audience reacted to the National Theatre’s interpretation of national theatre can be unearthed only by looking at individual productions and the reactions they elicited. The statistics already tell us that there was no coherent single national audience and that the Theatre’s development and programming also reflected that fact.
