Finns Remember Invisible Migrants through Performance
Pirkko Koski*
Muistopäivä (Day of Remembrance), written by Elli Salo, directed by Riikka Oksanen. Set design by Janne Vasama, Costume design by Saija Siekkinen, Light and Video design by Ville Virtanen, Music and Sound design by Eva Louhivuori and Ilkka Tolonen, Choreography by Lasse Lipponen. Premiere at Finnish National Theatre Nov 19, 2025.
The new Finnish National Theatre production, Muistopäivä (Day of Remembrance), is anchored in Finnish history, yet the play successfully engages its contemporary audiences through both its subject matter and its staging. The performance is relevant to our contemporary moment, or at the very least has recognisable echoes: cross-border movement and the search for new dwellings driven by a variety of factors have become ubiquitous in modern life. In the play, the Eastern border of Finland is clandestinely crossed by people heading for the Soviet Union of the 1930s, only to end up as tragic victims of Stalin’s purges. The connection to our contemporary moment is mediated through a recognition of the current state of the world, a type of metonymy, rather than directly through narrative or thematic links.
In Elli Salo’s play, a group of undocumented Finnish citizens leave to join the U.S.S.R. by traversing the Gulf of Finland by boat in 1931. By the early 1930s, Finland’s Prohibition was ending, and smugglers diversified their income by taking people illegally over the border to the Soviet Union. Along the route, they not only had to stay clear of the Finnish police hunting down criminals but also avoid the Russian border patrols. In the play, after a dangerous sea voyage, the defectors’ journey continues through a series of refugee camps to beyond the Ural Mountains.
Their journey continues from camp to camp, and their living conditions become increasingly straitened: the inevitable denouement is sadly evident to most of the audience from the play’s outset. The group is swallowed up by the Stalinist purges of 1938, with only the youngest member of the group spared. Performance is used to deepen audience awareness, and along with the play’s moral message, this creates dramatic tension. The play brings the issue of migration to the forefront, highlighting an unspoken form of national migration that family members left behind in Finland, or those who managed to return home, seldom referred to. At the same time, the play reminds us that people who have been swallowed up by large historical movements also had their own meaningful private lives.
The action of the play is set off by the economic depression of the early 1930s and the societal legacy of the 1918 Finnish Civil War. The extreme right was gaining a visible position in Finnish society, and the ‘Reds’, who lost the war and were returning from imprisonment, were seeking a role in Finnish society. In Finland, the reputation of a burgeoning Soviet Union was a divided one: alongside a generalised fear of communism, Finland’s neighbouring country was seen as a worker’s paradise where the losing side of the Finnish Civil War could obtain the status of respected citizens. The reasons for leaving vary, but without proper documentation, they all share a similar fate.
Across history, the Eastern border between Finland and Russia has frequently been crossed clandestinely or under duress, and Finland’s prevailing political climate has largely dictated how these crossings are framed in the public imagination. The first wave of Finnish Gulag memoirs were published after Stalin’s death in the late 1950s, the second wave, after the Helsinki European Security Summit of 1975, was personified in Taisto Huuskonen, an established writer in the Soviet Union, who was allowed to return to Finland—the success of his memoir Laps Suomen (1979, Child of Finland) matches that of the 1950s books. Huuskonen’s work was dramatized for Tampere Workers’ Theatre in 1990. The 1975 summit on free movement had incentivised the publication of the author’s critical views on the Soviet regime, and the breaking up of the Soviet Union gave the theatrical event and its marketing an edge. In Elli Salo’s play, the topic of the border is approached through everyday experiences.
In today’s Finnish National Theatre, the play’s director Riikka Oksanen built an impressive, coherent piece of theatre out of the defectors’ journey, in which disparate elements are given space to blossom independently. And yet nothing feels separate from the work’s overall purpose, not even the joyful solo dance by Marja Salo where her character dances in borrowed high heels found on a corpse, the shoes evoking her previous life. Salo displays her astonishing skill and, embodying enthusiasm through her character, seems reluctant to leave the stage; the joy of that scene set against the backdrop of the character’s tragic fate is touching. Information is offered up to the viewer through multiple mediums, and the faces of the actors are blown up and repeated on large video screens. The scene-stealing boat in the opening scene is an example of how the visual space is fully explored. The narrative style is affective and appeals to bodily recognition. When a choreographed group dance repeats the same gestures of manual labour over an extended period, the exhaustion becomes infectious and seeps out into the audience. The transition from one milestone to the next in a cage is an effective way to depict a closed system. Live on stage, the masterful musical world of Eva Louhivuori and Ilkka Tolonen is brought to life, tightly integrated with the rest of the storytelling.
Elli Salo wrote the play in close co-operation with Finnish National Archive researchers undertaking a research project on Finnish migrants to Russia after 1917. The play’s scenes and dialogue are based on real archival material, primarily private letters, but Salo has chosen to construct fictional characters out of these documents, eschewing any real individuals. Members of the group are depicted with individual characteristics, but without psychologically realistic personalities. The characters embody the multitude of reasons why people undertake this journey, including coercion, as was the case with the boat operators commanded to stay with the others. The actors all radiate a special warmth. The ensemble is made up of seven different characters all from different backgrounds, so in a way, either by accident or design, they are building on a national story, a version of the Finnish national novel, Seitsemän veljestä (1870, Seven Brothers). Dramatizations of this novel have been used to construct a national image of the Finnish character for the last hundred years. This production builds on an image of the Finnish people as a distinct group, a group that will not integrate with the other nations constituting the Soviet Union. On stage, a sole phrase in Russian is uttered, and the Russian guard commands are heard as music, which the sole Russian-speaker of the group translates into Finnish.
The play’s topic is heavy, and the creators’ goal is to make invisible fates visible, which is an explicitly political aim. Even amongst the narrative richness, one is inevitably reminded of Bertolt Brecht, especially Mutter Courage. Even though the production is emotive, the viewer does not identify with the events or characters. As the action moves from one camp to the next, the texture of the experiences changes, as do the themes, forcing the viewer to construct a brutal vision of society. Through a Brechtian lens, the production can be seen as a detached snapshot of today’s world: as both a reclaiming of a lesser-known part of the Finnish national story, as well as a challenge to the viewer: across the world, as ever, or even increasingly, people are embarking on perilous journeys as undocumented migrants, motivated by a multitude of reasons.
*Pirkko Koski is Professor Emerita of Theatre Research at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She has written and edited numerous articles and books for both domestic and international audiences. Her most recent works include the monographs Suomen Kansallisteatteri ristipaineissa (The National Theatre of Finland Meeting Pressure Conflicts, 2019), Näyttelijänä Suomessa (Being an Actor in Finland, 2013) and Finland’s National Theatre 1974–1991: The Two Decades of Generational Contests, Cultural Upheavals and International Cold War Politics (2022).
Copyright © 2025 Pirkko Koski
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
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