60 years old | “I want to devote my life to praising other people,” says Sari Siikander

“But now it was pouring, now the sun is shining. You never know what will come from the sky, that’s the natural law of summer theater”, Sari Siikander says on the phone from Heinola.

Siikander directs Heinola’s summer theater There’s still time -comedy, and on the day of the interview, its premiere is a couple of days away. The play about three aging female friends is his eighth direction.

“I’m terribly grateful that I got a new profession in my older days.”

For a long time, however, he avoided directing.

“I thought I wasn’t smart enough. And maybe there was also some egoistic desire to be there in the limelight.”

Directorial debut happened “with a little coercion” in 2018 in the summer play of the Uusten Iloisen Teatteri. Siikander had been acting at UIT since 2008, now the theater board wanted him to direct a musical play Beautiful Veera.

“I really fell in love with this job. I got the same feeling of ecstasy that overcame me when my mother took me to the Valkeakoski city theater as a child,” Siikander recalls.

The performances of the professionally managed amateur theater, which still operates in Valkeakoski, made an impression. When Siikander saw On Fiddler’s Roofhe decided that he would become an actor.

“I have never had any other career dreams.”

Random ones apart from theater visits, culture was not practiced in Siikander’s childhood family. Father who worked in a paper mill and mother who was a seamstress didn’t read, and the only books on the bookshelf were encyclopedias. The worker’s background left a feeling of inferiority.

Siikander’s acting career began first as an amateur in Valkeakoski and then as an evening actor at the Hämeenlinna City Theatre, from where he transferred to the Jyväskylä City Theater as an acting trainee. In Jyväskylä, he was on loan for three years and applied time and time again to the Theater Academy.

On the fifth attempt, he caught it. He was 26 years old, one of the oldest in his class.

“I felt that everyone else was more well-read than me,” says Siikander.

He made himself lists of books in the Yellow Library that he should read.

“There was the idea that I had reached such a great place that I had to know about things, which is not a terribly bad thing now. After all, we have to understand the world so that we can be human to each other.”

Among other things, a good friend studied at the theater school in the same year course Tiina Lymi mixed Pirjo Lonka, Petteri Summanen and Jani Volanen.

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“I want to dedicate my life to praising other people.”

At school acting professor Kari Väänänen and lecturer Kari Heiskanen encouraged acting students to also take courses in dramaturgy and directing.

“We were encouraged to have the courage to jump over the border fences. When you look at my fellow students, you can tell that the message got through.”

Siikander himself does not like qualifying. The actor, who is often defined as a comedian, says that he was confused when he was laughed at for the first time on the UIT stage.

“I turned to look behind me to see what was happening there, because I didn’t think of myself as comical.”

Siikander graduated from theater college and became unemployed during the recession, in 1994.

In retrospect, this was a blessing in his opinion, because otherwise he wouldn’t have had the courage to remain a freelancer.

“It hasn’t even occurred to me to look for an attachment.”

The home theater and an important community became the improvisational theater Stella Polaris, where Siikander has acted since 1995. Another home theater was UIT.

In the fast changes of the UIT revues, there were several mistakes. Siikander remembers that one show Chef war in a parody sketch, he had to be the one throwing a tomato into the audience.

“It actually slipped out of my hand and hit the lady wearing a white suit. I was terribly scared.”

At the end of the show Marjatta Leppänen announced the victim of the tomato rain to come to the place so that the theater could reimburse the laundry expenses.

Siikander thanks that he has been able to do many things. Thanks are still pouring in for Tampere Työväen Theater Marilyn– about the title role of the musical from 2005.

Juba Tuomolan based on the cartoon Delay and Wagner -performances (2006 and 2009) in the roles of Viiv in the Helsinki City Theater for several years. He played a great dramatic role in the same theater Little foxes – in the show in 2020.

On the threshold of sixty, he says that he understood one thing.

“We can’t do everything anymore. Now is the moment to brighten your dream. This process is still a bit unfinished for me.”

What would you tell your 20-year-old self?

“Don’t worry, I’m still fine.”