Utøya Review

August 15, 2024

13th – 31st August 2024

On 22 July 2011, just before 3:30 in the afternoon, a lone figure driven by an extreme right-wing ideology detonated a bomb outside a building in Oslo’s Government Quarter, killing eight people and injuring many more. Two hours later, he was on the island of Utøya, where a subsidiary of the ruling Norwegian Labour Party, the Workers’ Youth League, was running a summer camp. He opened fire, killing another 69 people.

Edoardo Erba’s Utøya, here translated from Italian into English by Marco Young, tells the fictional stories of three pairs of individuals as the events and aftermath of that day unfold. We have Gunnar and Malin, a couple who have sent their teenage daughter, Kristina, to the summer camp. We have siblings Petter and Inga, who live on the farm next to that of the attacker. And we have Alf and Unni, two police officers, one subordinate to the other, stationed less than a kilometre from Utøya.

“Utøya is well-crafted, well-produced, well-acted. It asks some important questions.”

The three pairs are unrelated and never meet. The play cuts back and forth between them, each pair superbly played by Young (the translator) and Kate Reid. There can be no doubt that this is slick theatre. While there may be moments when a new scene begins and we’re not entirely sure which pair we’re with, any confusion is soon dispelled through a combination of Erba’s impressive structuring and Young and Reid’s nimble performances.

The production is polished and sophisticated too. The audience sits on four sides of the stage. A simple wooden table and two chairs sit in the centre. On the table are a magazine and a newspaper. Under the table, a jagged line runs the width of the stage. As the play begins, we hear birdsong, wind, the faint rustling of trees, some mechanical sounds, perhaps a tractor on a farm. When news of the first attack strikes, the table splits in two, the crack in the tabletop mirroring the line on the floor below.

And this is what the play is about: deep-seated fault lines in Norwegian society waiting to tear things apart. Like the six characters on stage, we do not witness any aspect of the attacks of 22 July 2011. The press release sent out in advance of last night’s performance tells us that the aim of the play is to ‘represent the pain felt universally in Norway through these imagined characters one removed from the tragedy’. While this may be an admirable intent, as the play develops, it brings with it an uneasy, nagging feeling that far from being remembered and honoured, the 77 people who were killed on that day are instead being used simply as a dramatic device. It would be remiss not to note that the names of those 77 are sensitively displayed on posters outside the auditorium, but they were too far removed from the play itself.

We are also told that the play’s characters were created ‘through extensive research’. This raises several questions, since, while the characters are all well-drawn, it is not at all clear why Erba chose to create the character set he did. For a start, they are all ethnic Norwegians. To a lesser or greater extent (often the latter) at least one person in each pair displays deep-set racist views. In a play that explores racism so directly, why are only white people given a voice?

There is also profound, Pinteresque misogyny. Each pair is, rather conservatively, made up of
one man and one woman. When Unni challenges Alf on the decisions he’s making—on whether they should stay put or go to Utøya and face the attacker—he says, “Shut up and obey your orders… you slut”. This is just one example of the many violent subjugations Alf revels in inflicting on his subordinate. While, in its own right, this is important ground to explore, there are times when it risks detracting from the main thrust of the play.

Unfortunately, though perhaps realistically, it is only in the vaguest sense that any of the play’s characters come to reconsider their sexist, racist and nationalist views. Utøya is well-crafted, well-produced, well-acted. It asks some important questions. Whether it’s the right response to what happened on 22 July 2011 is another matter.