During a far-right terrorist attack in Norway in 2011, 77 people were killed: 69 at a summer camp on an island in the Tyrifjorden lake, another eight in a bomb blast outside Oslo’s parliament building. Two 2018 films – Paul Greengrass’s 22 July and Erik Poppe’s Utøya: July 22 – plunged audiences into the bloodshed. Edoardo Erba adopts a tangential approach for his two-hander Utøya, written in 2015 and now receiving its UK premiere directed by Sarah Stacey. The idea, Erba says, is to “imagine being on the side of the black hole, but not in it”. He elects not to name the perpetrator, shifting the emphasis away from a single bogeyman and on to a poisonous ideology.
On a tiny stage surrounded by the audience and bare except for a table and two chairs, Kate Reid and Marco Young alternate between playing three pairs of characters: Malin and Gunnar nervously await a call from their daughter, who only attended the summer camp at her father’s insistence; police officers Unni and Alf debate whether to disobey orders and head for the island; and siblings Inga and Petter speculate about the comings and goings of their oddball neighbour.
