What is it like to go to war as a profession?
The war in Ukraine has been in the news daily for more than three years. Still, the soldier’s experience is often overshadowed, and war is seen as great power politics, strategic decisions, and arrows on maps that depict the movements of troops.
“When we suddenly hear an individual’s experience of what war does to a person, it turns into a terribly personal tragedy. Even if a person does not die, some part of them will die,” says director Tuomas Rinta-Panttila.
This is exactly the perspective brought up by Aleksi from Finland, who tells the life story of volunteer fighter Aleksi Lysander (1989–2024). The play delves into how a person ends up voluntarily going to war and what kind of psychological process they go through as a result.
“This is an emotional and empathetic theatre experience that gives a two-hour moment to face things from a human perspective,” says Ari-Pekka Lahti, who dramatised the play.
From a non-fiction book to the stage
The play is based on the book of the same name (WSOY) written by Tuomas Kyrö, which was nominated for the Finlandia Prize for non-fiction in 2023.
In the book, Aleksi Lysander’s story is accompanied by Kyrö’s personal account of the writing of the book, trips to Ukraine and elsewhere for background interviews, and his relationship with the war.
Lahti says that the delimitation was challenging at first in adapting it into a play, but in the end it was decided to focus only on Aleksi Lysander and his life.
The play was prepared in collaboration with Lysander. At the beginning of the process, he invited Lahti to listen to a lecture in which he and Juha Kreus discussed the effects of war on the individual – why someone wants to go to war and how it changes a person.
Lahti describes the lecture as crucial, as it made him understand that the presentation should deal with an individual’s inner experience of war.
“When I listened to two people who had been in the war, who told about their experiences in great detail, the war seemed to come closer in a different way than through the media or films.”
Lysander died in fighting in eastern Ukraine in late 2024.
Two Aleksi from Finland tries to be as faithful as possible to Aleksi Lysander’s life. According to Lahti, what is heard on stage has happened in real life.
“Most of it is based on a book written by Kyrö, while a small part is based on what Aleksi himself has told me. His wish was that the human suffering of the war would be brought to light as brutally and honestly as possible.”
Because the focus of the play was chosen to be the soldier’s individual experience, it began to feel impossible to perform a war game,” Rinta-Panttila says.
“In war-related artworks, the world is often quite masculine, loud and noisy, but this time we wanted to avoid that. Let’s not start making a fuss about it, but let’s bring it up in a declarative way.”
Aleksi Suomesta is a minimalist performance focusing on storytelling, in which two actors (Roderick Kabanga and Eetu Känkänen) take turns playing Aleksi. One of them is the experiencer and the other acts as the narrator, as if as an interpreter between the experiencing Aleksi and the audience.
“The solution emphasizes that we are together in the theatre in front of this work of art, and even though the work is based on a life lived, the aim is more of an attempt to understand the soldier than to just show what happened,” Lahti says and continues:
“Soldiers are rarely listened to. That’s what Aleksi told me. That soldiers’ experiences are rarely of interest to anyone. This is strange. After all, soldiers act in war, experience things and, through that, also understand war.”
“The performance has been tuned into a situation of sharing and confiding, right down to the set design. Instead of loud and harsh, it is becoming quiet and sensitive,” Rinta-Panttila describes.