The playwright’s word
My name is Ari-Pekka Lahti, I am the author of this play. Non-military serviceman.
I don’t know anything about war. Or what I do know is that my grandfather was a horseman in the Winter War. I remember the only time he told me about the war, when I was 6 years old. My father asked him about it. He asked me what it was like in the war, what you were doing there. Grandpa replied that he was a horseman. It must have been an easy job, my father replied. It became quiet, then Grandpa said: “When you look for the frozen bodies of your friends between the lines, you can get a bullet in the head at any time. It wasn’t easy.” No more was said about the war. Never.
Samuli Aleksi Lysander was a professional soldier. He was trained to fight at the age of 18. After that, he served as a mountain jaeger in several crisis hotspots from Afghanistan to Africa until he died as a volunteer soldier in Ukraine near the turn of the year in 2024.
Author Tuomas Kyrö wrote a book about him based on factual information. Kyrö went to interview Lysander in Kyiv, Ukraine, during the war. The book was nominated for the Finlandia Prize for Non-fiction, and brought Aleksi Lysander’s name to the attention of the entire nation.
Based on Aleksi’s story, it was decided to make a theatre performance. I was given the task of putting together the dramaturgy of that performance. I read Kyrö’s book and through it I got to know a person I had never met. In addition, I got to know the soldier’s profession, and I met Aleksi himself many times. The last time I talked to him was when Aleksi was in Ukraine in the fall of 2024. Aleksi had no money, he called and said he was in trouble. I collected the collection from my friends and sent him 800 euros via Western Union so that he could get a helmet and some important equipment before going into battle.
Over the past year and a half, I have asked myself several times what right I have to write his story on stage. What right do I have to try to get into his shoes, even though I understand very well that no other person can get under the surface. Or you can, but the reality is always something other than what someone in a writer’s chamber imagines.
Tuomas Kyrö based his book on documentation, a wealth of interview material he had edited himself. That’s what I thought of doing, and I did, but I partially changed my mind after talking to Aleksi Lysander. I had been listening to a four-hour lecture given by Aleksi and his friend Juha Kreus : What is war, and what does it do to the individual? What is the real cost of war? Aleksi had asked me to come to the lecture as usual with a twinkle in his eye: “Come and maybe you’ll figure out something about this stuff,” he had said. “Well, did I get it?”, he asked after the lecture. I couldn’t speak, I was so shocked by the material in the lecture. Or not just about the material, but perhaps more about the fact that the human experience of war came close to the people who had experienced the war.
It felt as if the veil of war had been pushed aside. Thousands of war films I had seen, war books I had read gave way and I was looked straight in the eye by a person who had experienced war himself.
I told this to Aleksi and asked him how on earth I could do the same through my play. What should I write there?
Aleksi showed his sharpness again when he replied to me: “When we talk about war, we often hear someone else’s testimony, never a soldier’s. We soldiers do not speak. Or if we do, we don’t tell everything. There is an area that is not usually visited. Today we went there. Use everything you hear and tell about the soldier’s experience. Go for it. Without any filters.”
“But it will be my experience, not yours,” I replied to Aleksi. He looked at me for a long time and replied, “The most important thing is that you try your best and listen. That you look at my life and try to understand. That doesn’t happen enough in this life.”
This work is the result of that sincere effort. This is based on Kyrö’s book, this is based on a lecture by Lysander and Kreus, and what Lysander himself has told me during numerous conversations.
This performance tells the story of Aleksi Lysander, but it could just as well be the story of another young man who has voluntarily chosen the path of a soldier as his life’s mission.
This show is about men who have more than one name, but one undivided heart.