Something is rotten in Swedish theatre. In front of Elverket – a former power station that for much of the last 30 years has been at the centre of Stockholm’s experimental dramatic output – posters proclaim that theatre is dead. Inside the former turbine hall, either side of a red chandelier-lit platform surrounded by contorted bodies, Hamlet and Ophelia, brilliantly played by Gustav Lindh and Gizem Erdogan, are furiously channelling the rage of a generation, loudly hitting the walls with bars. In the play’s final seconds, gravediggers give way to builders dressed in high-vis come in to cover the stage in tarpaulin and start work.
This adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, not so cryptically subtitled The Death of Theatre, is the venue’s last ever theatre production before it is shut down. Dramaten, the royal dramatic theatre that functions as Sweden’s national stage, has been forced to let go of the venue, which over three decades became a well-funded home for risk-taking performances and new writing. Among its greatest hits were Personkrets 3:1, a six and a half hour long play written and directed by the late Lars Norén about homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness; the Swedish premiere of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed; and Tusen år hos Gud (A thousand years with God), a sprawling dance-theatre-opera based on the writing of Stig Dagerman. In 2006, I saw a young Noomi Rapace star in Kane’s brutally violent play Blasted here.
