Review: Sörjen som blev

A four-year-old boy is sent to Sweden during the Continuation War, and the separation from his mother and younger brother becomes a lifelong trauma. Anna Takanen’s monologue The Grief That Became depicts the family’s history and the traces it has left behind.

In the monologue performance The Grief That Became (directed by Mikaela Hasán), Anna Takanen depicts her own family history and tells how her father Timo was sent to Sweden as a four-year-old during the Continuation War.

The stay was supposed to be temporary, but after the war years, Timo stays with his Swedish foster family. He gets married and has a daughter Anna, who grows up in Sweden. Even though he reconnects with his family in Finland, the separation remains as a painful trauma in the family.

Takanen has acted, directed and worked as a theatre manager at the Gothenburg City Theatre and at the City Theatre in Stockholm. The Grief That Became was published in 2019 as a novel, but now the work is being staged in play form.

The daughter breaks her father’s silence

Four-year-old Timo is first flown to Stockholm to be treated for pneumonia, and from the hospital he is sent across the country by train to the town where he will meet his Swedish family.

It is a shocking depiction of the lonely boy’s journey, he does not know where he is being taken, does not understand what is being said around him, and does not know when he will see his mother and his little brother again.

His new home is with a childless couple on a farm. Tii-mo, they call him in the Swedish way. He will stay with them, for reasons that will not become clear to him until many years later.

The story is also about how Anna grows up with her Finnish surname in Sweden, and how she grows up and begins to demand answers from her father. And how he reluctantly gives in and starts telling.

Traces over several generations

Anna Takanen will be accompanied on stage by the Finnish musician Harri Kuusijärvi, who will accompany the story on the accordion. She plays against a stripped-down grey background where she draws simple elements with chalk.

With his accordion melodies, Kuusijärvi gives the story an enjoyable flow. But his presence on stage as a humorous portrayal of Anna Takanen’s own relationship with Finland – for example, how picky Finns insist on correcting how she pronounces her own surname – unfortunately tends to disarm the emotional charge of the story.

The performance includes sparse props, some logs, a wooden doll, some storage boxes. But the stage image feels somewhat indecisive, it strives for simplicity but still has too many elements to feel intimate.

The grief that became is driven by a heartfelt desire to understand and reconcile with the past. This desire permeates the characters’ actions and becomes the first impulse that sets the story in motion, when the daughter Anna decides to break her father’s stubborn silence.

At the same time, it feels as if the desire for reconciliation proves stronger than the desire to get to the bottom of the truth. At the end of the performance, burning questions about guilt and responsibility are still unanswered – about a Swedish family that keeps a child against his own and the mother’s will, about a stepfather in Finland who, with the threat of violence, stands in the way of reunification.

The Grief That Became is a story that is of great urgency right now when insecurity in the world is growing and driving people, including lonely children, to flee.

Stories like this draw attention to the personal tragedies that refugees entail, even when the story ends with the refugees finding refuge and a new home. The severed family ties and the loss leave traces over several generations.