On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 peo­ple and injured more than 200 in Nor­way. Before he attacked his fel­low cit­i­zens he sent out a 1500 page man­i­festo con­tain­ing racist pro­pa­gan­da, philo­soph­i­cal reflec­tions, bomb man­u­als, inter­views he con­duct­ed with him­self and diary entries. Dan­ish the­atre mak­ers Chris­t­ian Lol­like, Olaf Høj­gaard and Tan­ja Diers won­dered what made him do it. They decid­ed to inves­ti­gate the Man­i­festo and the man behind the atroc­i­ties to see if they could fig­ure it out. The result is this com­pelling explo­ration of how some­one rad­i­calis­es them­selves.

I had mis­giv­ings about going to this show. The mur­ders were a way to pro­mote the man­i­festo, and with every­thing else going on in the world, I wasn’t sure that I want­ed to engage with yet more hate and big­otry. But if I was to under­stand what steers peo­ple to pol­i­tics so dif­fer­ent from my own then I need­ed to give this a chance. I’m glad I did. As a the­atre piece it’s stripped back and clev­er­ly lay­ered. It’s pre­sent­ed as Højgaard’s deter­mi­na­tion to ‘see the world through his eyes.’ Edwin Wright is great as Høj­gaard. He’s laid-back in the begin­ning then phys­i­cal­ly becomes more tense as he delves fur­ther and Højgaard’s inves­ti­ga­tion becomes less aca­d­e­m­ic and more expe­ri­en­tial.  Wright is able to present the dilem­ma of being against the actions yet des­per­ate to under­stand why ‘any­one can allow them­selves to be manip­u­lat­ed in that way.’ Sim­i­lar­ly the design (set by John Ver­ryt, cos­tume by Eliz­a­beth Whit­ing) reflects this desire to see things in black and white, to study the light and the dark in order to extract some sort of mean­ing or log­i­cal progress. Ruby Reihana-Wilson’s excel­lent light­ing design along­side Ander Falstie-Jensen’s direc­tion is care­ful­ly judged to inten­si­fy ten­sion or to punc­ture it.

As a ‘forum for dis­cussing what goes on in our world’ (as described in the pro­gramme) it’s fright­en­ing. This is most­ly about Europe but there are extreme rightwing groups advo­cat­ing vio­lence in New Zealand Aotearoa as well. It would be easy to demonise these peo­ple or to dis­miss them for their very ordi­nar­i­ness.  It would equal­ly be as easy to be infu­ri­at­ed by their actions or their words. I refuse to be. I’m going to reread our Tom’s words and Alex Casey on the Spin­off and resist attempts to divide the world into us and them.

Thanks The Rebel Alliance for bring­ing this the­atre piece to Welling­ton. I don’t think I enjoyed it but I appre­ci­ate that I had a chance to see it.