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.