“Finland Is Dead, Dead, Dead” Ethics and National Identity in Kristian Smeds’s The Unknown Soldier Hana Worthen Hana Worthen 34 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00166 by guest on 28 September 2021 [T]he human is but a point of view, a nontranscendent entity beguiled by the transcendent promises that inhere in narrative. — Paul Sheehan (2002:48) Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier) directed by Kristian Smeds opened at the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki in November 2007 and remained in the repertoire for about two years.1 Restaging Finland’s World War II struggle against the Soviet Union (1941–44) from the perspective of ordinary soldiers, Smeds’s production challenges the fashioning of national iden- tity sustained by Finland’s best-known modern epics, Väinö Linna’s 1954 novel of the same name and Edvin Laine’s 1955 film adaptation.2 An enormously successful, vivid, and iconoclastic theatre work, the stage performance generated impassioned discussions in the press, on televi- sion, on the internet, and in the Finnish Parliament, dramatizing a tension between the patri- otic narrative of war and independence within national memory and the contemporary pressure in Finland to adapt to membership in the world community. For those who hold to a “uni- form national narrative” and vigorously opposed the production, Smeds’s Unknown Soldier epit- omized “brouhaha art,” “hate culture,” interchangeably Stalinism/communism/socialism, the “misinterpretation of history,” and “a slap in the face of patriotic Finland.” For those who sup- ported it, the production opened a “disclosure of social ills,” provoking a much-needed discus- sion about a pluralistic Finland (Kyyrö 2009:57–76).3 For Smeds, this Unknown Soldier does not seek peace. This performance does not seek consensus. This performance does not worship icons. This performance does not seek acceptance. 1. My thanks to the “Interweaving Performance Cultures” International Research Center of the Freie Universität, Berlin for its collegial support during my work on this article. I saw The Unknown Soldierin May 2009, and am grateful to the Smeds Ensemble for providing me with a DVD version of the production as it was broadcast by YLE Teema television in 2009. On Kristian Smeds’s early career see Ruuskanen and Smeds (2005). 2. For a rather inadequate English translation, see Linna (1968). Laine’s film, Tuntematon sotilas, is available as a DVD; see Laine ([1955] 2001). Rauni Mollberg directed a remake of Tuntematon sotilas in 1985, but Laine’s remains the classic version. A detailed analysis of the genesis of Linna’s novel and Laine’s film, and of their popu- lar and scholarly reception is found in Varpio (2006:270–356; 374–82). 3. All quotations are taken from Jere Kyyrö, who shows how the reception polarized around discourses of Finnishness: opponents clung to a “uniform national narrative” sustained by nationalistic discourses emphasiz- ing national unity; they also interpreted Finland’s wars as “sacrifice,” while the proponents’ discourses took a plu- ralistic point of view. However, Kyyrö argues, both sides were interested in discussing how contemporary Finland should organize itself into a nation. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Figure 1. (facing page) Karelian/Finnish soldiers Corporeal Rokka (Henry Hanikka) and Susi, played by the dog, in The Unknown Soldier (2007) directed by Kristian Smeds at the Finnish National Theatre. (Photo by Antti Ahonen) Hana Worthen is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University, and affiliated faculty of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She is the author of Playing “Nordic”: The Women of Niskavuori, Agri/Culture, and Imagining Finland on the Third Reich Stage (University of Helsinki, 2007). She has published articles on ideology and performance in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Contemporary Theatre Review,and GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism. Her interdisciplinary work on the performance of national identities in Finnish history and historiography has appeared in East European Jewish Affairs. She is currently editing an anthology examining cultures of silencing in Finnish academia. [email protected] TDR: The Drama Review 56:2 (T214) Summer 2012. ©2012 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00166 by guest on 28 September 2021 Kristian Smeds (b. 1970) is a Finnish theatre director and playwright with a distinguished national and international career. After studying dramaturgy at the Helsinki Theatre Academy, in 1996 he founded Theatre Takomo in the capital, also serving as its Artistic Director. Here, he experimented with applying a new spatiality and site specificity to familiar plays, staging Ibsen’s Brand in an old tram depot and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in a pumping station. From 2001 to 2004 Smeds led the Kajaani City Theatre; under his artistic leadership, this regional theatre situated in northern Finland became nationally and internationally recognized for its dialogue with the social problems of the province and for its innovative performance work, notably Smeds’s Huutavan ääni korvessa (A cry in the wilderness; 2001) and a rock concert version of Büchner’s Woyzeck (2003). At this time, Smeds also began to explore a broader use of technology onstage. His Three Sisters (2004) set Chekhov’s play in the Kainuu region of Finland, and used live-feed video to track the actors throughout—and outside—the theatre. In 2005 he began to work independently in the Baltic countries. At Von Krahl Theatre in Tallinn, Estonia, he directed Arto Paasilinna’s Jäniksen vuosi (The year of the hare; 2005), an adventure story conceptualized as fairytale for adults, and Chekhov’s The Seagull (2007), which staged a dialogue between different generations of Estonian actors. In 2007, together with video artist Ville Hyvönen and producer Eeva Bergroth, he founded the Smeds Ensemble, a mobile company producing theatre work, radio plays, workshops, and performance and video art. Between 2008 and 2010 Smeds developed a process-oriented Cherry Orchard with actors in Vilnius, Lithuania, documented by Ville Hyvönen’s and Lennar Laberenz’s film; in 2011, a remade, site-specific version was performed during the Wiener Festwochen, playing in part at an immigrant colony on the periphery of the city. Smeds’s work is closely associated with artistic, intellectual, and political debates in Finland and abroad, and his performances stage a meditation on the state of the artist and theatre in diverse locations and cultures. His Jumala on kauneus (God is beauty), premiered at Theatre Takomo in 2000 and revived for the Finnish National Theatre in 2008, focused on the psychological and political struggles of a young artist. Unsettling the easy equilibrium between national and larger European perspectives, many of his stagings, notably The Unknown Soldier (Finnish National Theatre, 2007) and Mental This performance does not seek to be a shared experience. This performance does not seek to be politically correct. This performance does not seek to be a patriotic victory parade.4 Delving into the ethics of national memory, Smeds’s mise-en-scène emphasizes the presentness of the performance and of the theatre, framing a dialectic between the archive of national self- imaging and its reconceptualization in the present. According to Smeds, his Unknown Soldier is the “independence party” of the young generation (Smeds 2007), a party that celebrates unset- tling rifts in the nation’s identity, as the ethical insularity of the Finnish World War II imagi- nary gives way to the more dispersed imagery of contemporary globalization and its virulent “remote control” wars. Interrogating “Finnishness” as an “ordinary,” ethico-political institution, The Unknown Soldier is a taboo-breaking example of the political potential of postdramatic the- atre to intervene in, and to mediate, the ethics of national memory. “Finland is dead, dead, dead” Entering the National Theatre’s main auditorium, the conjunction of past and present is tech- nologically marked in Smeds’s Unknown Soldier: the audience sees a handwritten inscription on a cardboard sign to the left of the stage, “sulje kännykkä” (turn off your mobile), and two red 4. Smeds’s remarks, originally published on the Finnish National Theatre website, are translated in a note accompa- nying a screening of the TV version of The Unknown Soldier in Latvia (see Latvijas Jaunā Teātra Institūts 2010). Hana Worthen 36 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00166 by guest on 28 September 2021 Finland (Royal Flemish Theatre, 2009), destabilize notions of national identities while provocatively reflecting on the power of theatre as a vehicle for their dissemination. In 2010, his adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel Mr. Vertigo opened at the Finnish National Theatre. In this work, Smeds limited the 700-seat capacity of the main auditorium to 200. Seating the spectators on the turntable onstage, letting them gaze into the ghostly auditorium, Mr Vertigo considered the relationship between illusion and desire in theatrical performance. Smeds’s productions of classic plays and adaptations of novels—Sad Songs from the Heart of Europe (2006), a monologue for the character Sonja drawn from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and his recent 12Karamazovs (2011)—complicate the cultural legacies of contemporary