Director’s word: Those silenced by shame get a voice
I started preparing this stage work more than two years ago. The world was shaken by the pandemic crisis, but war still seemed far away. I thought that we are already a long way away from our own wars and we can safely look at the more silent and painful aspects of our history. Perhaps the most meaningful aspect of the work would be to highlight the personal passage through the crisis as a point of view. But then everything changed and our collective wounds became visible in an instant. It turned out that there is only a thin translucent scar tissue on top of them. Dealing with our past is only just beginning.
The mainstream of historiography has reached the point where we have mapped the political decisions made at the top, the front lines, the battles and the fallen. In my opinion, Tommi Kinnunen’s novel takes a radical approach to the great narratives of our past. He does not talk about the shifting of state borders and victorious battles – they are trivial. The novel Didn’t Tell Me Regrets focuses on the people who sustain life. Those who did the laundry, served coffee and bread, patched up the wounded, taught new things, kept them good, fed and cared for.
The book is also about shame – a feeling that we carry across generations without always even knowing why. When people tried to make sense of misery and suffering after the wars or just put up with it, some found women who had worked for the Germans as scapegoats. This kind of unjustified and loosely targeted, but still damaging hatred is still familiar to many people – especially women – on online platforms, for example. I believe in the power of art to make visible. When you can identify yourself and your experiences in fiction, you get the feeling for a moment that you are not alone. The main characters of this story, Irene, Aili, Siiri, Veera and Katri, march through the wilderness so that the rest of us would be a little freer and safer to breathe.
Working on a novel for the stage is a bigger change than translating the work into another language. You have to get to know the work from the very beginning and create your own theatrical form for it. What is it on this particular stage, made with these people, right now? When I told Tommi that I wanted to make a performance of the novel, he was a little surprised. How can this novel be turned into theatre when you just walk around and think? But for me, it is precisely that form that suggests an interesting theatrical language. Concretising the emotions, experiences and thoughts bubbling under the visible surface on stage challenges poetic expression. In the performance, the women walk in the wilderness, the music gives strength to the calves. Suddenly, a person’s memory or imagination pops into the landscape. We get a moment to live with the secret and private moment. Then the journey continues, but with these memories, the wanderers change.
I would like to thank the Helsinki City Theatre for the opportunity to bring this story to the big stage. This is one of those places of art from which small mountain streams flow into the stream of great stories. Of the canons of literature, film and theatre, everyone remembers Rokka, Hietanen, Lehto, Lammio and Rahikainen. And that’s a very good thing. Perhaps in the future, in addition to these, Irene, Aili, Siiri, Katri and Veera will become equally well-known names.
28.1.2023
Susanna Airaksinen
Dramatist and director