Autumn 2013

Vadi
5
the closet). From then on, he published short
stories, novels and plays. Ten excellent
books for such a relatively young man is
quite an achievement.
Vadi’s texts are fluent and seem to have
been written down in the easy rhythm of
breathing in and out. There is, however,
detailed preparation. For plays and longer
prose texts, Urmas produces graphs, noting
down the main events, plot lines, and how
the main characters move and change. This
provides a structure and composition to
return to if something seems wrong. Nothing
flippant then: writing is hard work.
How did it happen that a perfectly nice
young man became a writer? Vadi says he
began writing in secondary school. The 8 th
Secondary School in Tartu was rather
exceptional: it had a special class of
literature that included creative writing.
Urmas regarded himself as a writer even
back then, although he now finds it idiotic to
be a writer if you see yourself as one.
For his readers, it is certainly no longer
an issue whether he is a writer or not. Urmas
has no need to prove himself, but if he really
has to introduce himself to someone he
might confess to being a writer.
It can be pretty embarrassing to be
introduced as a writer, and a well-known one
at that. Urmas once went to a wedding
reception and was introduced to the bride’s
mother as “the famous writer Urmas Vadi”.
The poor mother seemed to frantically
search her memory, but the name of the
“famous writer” clearly did not ring a bell. It
happens.
Having started with short stories and
published novels, he now mostly writes
plays, which have been staged in Estonian
theatres since 2001. Some are reflective,
and some more humorous. Urmas is still
fond of writing short stories and has, in fact,
recently given up plays for a while and is
planning to write a number of stories. He
thus keeps the genres apart, as they really
are quite different, starting with the plot
structure.
In the past few years he has produced a
number of his plays himself. This has
nothing to do with being suspicious of other
directors; he just assumes that he knows the
theatrical language in which his texts can
work best.
The good thing about producing your
own plays, according to Vadi, is that he
writes almost all his plays shortly before
directing them, thinking about a specific
venue or actors. Some examples: The Last
Kiss of Peeter Volkonski and Rein Pakk Is
Looking for a Woman. The lead in the first
was naturally played by Peeter Volkonski
and in the other by Rein Pakk. Vadi thus