Review: Ei kertonut katuvansa

Relatable to randomness

When German troops withdraw from northern Norway and return to their homeland, the services of Finnish women who have worked for the German army – as nurses, washers, canteens, scribes, among others – are no longer needed. Only some pregnant women are taken along, others are allowed to return home, accompanied by shame, although the majority had been brought to Norway by professional skills or the need for labour. Working for a respected comrade-in-arms nation has turned into treason.

At the beginning of the play by Tommi Kinnunen, which premiered at the Helsinki City Theatre on 9 February 2023 and is based on the novel No Told You Regret it, which was nominated for the Finlandia Prize in 2020 and is dramatised and directed by Susanna Airaksinen , five women who have retreated to Norway with the Germans, ended up in a prison camp there and escaped in connection with the prison transport, learn that Germany has surrendered unconditionally to the Allied forces. After that, they know almost nothing about the situation in Finland or the rest of the world.

The escape is made on foot through burnt Lapland, at the mercy of the harsh nature and with the help of the love of a few merciful fellow human beings. Set designer Vilma Mattila’s clever solutions take a concrete and stream-of-consciousness journey of the mind with its numerous twists and turns. Composer Johanna Puuperä’s music, played by an electric guitar band, sets the rhythm of the performance, crystallizes the moods and complements the emotions; leaves space, you don’t have to say everything.

The play gives an excellent picture of the chaotic events in Lapland in the spring and summer of 1945, but as a whole it rises into a psychic palsa bog into which the possibilities and, above all, the impossibility of making choices can be reflected.

Each of the women in the play has left their home only because it made more sense to leave than to stay in that situation. Veera (Ursula Salo), who sells sex in a wilderness cottage, decided that it was best to get out of people’s teeth when she got her son raised in a respectable shoemaker’s family so that the boy would not be bullied. Irene (Heidi Herala), exhausted by the joyless touchlessness of a dead marriage, is charmed by the German officer’s tight-fitting uniform. A girl from a poor wilderness cottage is fleeing from the absolutism of her fanatical father and the drowning of youth in eternal work. The elderly nurse is taken away by chance. A German language teacher with ambition at work. The outcome of the trip: a struggle for survival in the wilderness of Lapland, fornication and exclusion from the community, no one could have imagined.

In Tommi Kinnunen’s novel, which deals with a heavy subject, the humour he uses thematically extensively and with civilised elegance blooms with human warmth. That same warm humour peeks through the stage adaptation brilliantly. On the other hand, it shows how quickly a person starts to play with things that seemed like terrible things a moment ago.

When passing the conical structure – the landmark – piled up on the roadside for the first time, the women ponder how much effort and suffering they put into such rocky stacks.

When Irene and Veera get to their home village, everything else has been burned, the only building standing is Veera’s decaying cottage villain, which Irene aptly describes the feelings aroused: it was not the port wines offered to the captains or the choir songs performed to the sergeants that protected her from destruction, but the feeling given to the rank and file soldier that she was truly unique and important. The only house in the toilet is the small cottage of the local village.

However, when asked about Veera’s identity, Irene, the cantor’s wife, answers, regardless of the nearly 700 kilometres she has experienced together with Veera, accompanied by hints of fear, distress, confidation, guilt and joy, that she does not know the woman in question properly.

Faith in the existence of humanity is given when an unknown man offers the wandering women food, a sauna and a place to sleep, without asking where they are coming from and where they are going. The women also never ask each other why they went on a German journey. There is plenty to think about in one’s own departure and even in the return of power.

The old woman, who has lost everything, takes the wandering women to bake flatbread in the warmth of a crumbling baking oven in the middle of the ruins of a powerful house, and while baking, she says that even though the war has taken everything from her, the custom of making bread, as her mother had done in the past and the maternal grandmother before her, has survived, and she can still pass on that legacy to her great-grandchildren. In the hearts of women on the run, a freshly baked flatbread creates the joy of food memories, and the crying of these happy memories gives more than it takes. The women realise that memories of what is served on a weekday bind the people together more effectively than even the most uplifting military march.

The other returnees are on their way to rediscover their place in the community from which they left, only the cantor’s wife Irene continues her life as a vagrant. An irregular life has become a habit for him, but during police interrogation in February 1947, he did not say that he regretted the form of vagrancy he had chosen.