Vetelpäästja Vetemaa
Vetemaa’s Water Wings

Summary/Abstract: In order to approach the early dramatic works of Enn Vetemaa, this essay attempts to comment on some of his plays that were performed in soviet Estonia between 1969 and 1986. the teleplay Illuminations is an early, though not the first try to bring absurdity to the Estonian stages. at the same time it attacks the moscow theatre establishment by littering the scene with dead and stinking seagulls. a widely performed early stage play is Dinner for Five, a domestic drama trying to become more profound in the sense of G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy that tragedy, as in sophocles’ Antigone, is not a struggle between virtue and evil or good and bad, but rather between two goods. the first of Vetemaa’s three comedies involving Saint Susanna (but not necessarily the one in the Scriptures) also achieved considerable popularity. Trouble Again Because of Brains, influenced by dürrenmatt’s The Physicists and dealing with nuclear radiation, flirts with the theatre of Cruelty. Perhaps the most profound and moving of Vetemaa’s plays is The Rose Garden, an allegory of the takeover of independent Estonia by the soviet union during World War two. the most recent of these early plays focus on issues dealing with aging Bolsheviks or athletes addicted to doping.

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