PuhdistusReningPurge
Elderly Aliide Truu lives alone in her house in the Estonian countryside. The country has gained independence the previous year and land reform has begun. The old woman's everyday life is interrupted by Zara, a twenty-something woman who has fainted in the yard. After regaining consciousness, Zara says that she is running away from her abusive husband and asks for asylum. The encounter brings back to Aliide's mind the tearing memories of the choices that sealed the fate of those closest to her. Zara's situation, forced to make her own desperate decisions, shows that although the time has changed, persecution has not ended, it has only changed its form.
The women in Sofi Oksanen's play are attached to everyday life, where they have to live before, after and during oppression. The fatherland, the walls of the home cannot protect them, but the other sex and the machinery of power tear psychological and physical wounds in them. Why? Why doesn't the violence end already, Purge asks. The time for silence is over, when will it be the time of inviolability?
The play has been translated into Swedish, English, French, German, Danish, Estonian, Russian, Icelandic, Spanish and Slovenian.