![A young boy lays a flower opposite Utøya Island following the extremist attacks on July 25, 2011](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000389944655_17236188946550_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqGQR7TMwEvfaYG0TH6J-Ry06Usa8KZCn8ZaDf3fwLU6E.jpeg?imwidth=680)
‘The songs from the school memorial still give me chills’: remembering Norway’s darkest hour
Edoardo Erba’s play tackles the 2011 attacks in Utøya. Survivors and others affected by the tragedy share their thoughts
![A young boy lays a flower opposite Utøya Island following the extremist attacks on July 25, 2011](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000389944655_17236188946550_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqGQR7TMwEvfaYG0TH6J-Ry06Usa8KZCn8ZaDf3fwLU6E.jpeg?imwidth=680)
How should we commemorate the bloodshed of the past? In a museum, where glass cabinets provide a barrier to the grim history? In recreating it through art, as a living testament to the victims? In burying the matter completely, so that it may never traumatise again?
Utøya, which officially opens at the Arcola on Thursday night has picked the middle option. Billed as a “searing reflection on the domestic effects of societal trauma”, it explores the aftermath of Anders Breivik’s 2011 massacre, which resulted in the deaths of 77 people, 69 of whom were at a summer camp on the tiny island in the Tyrifjorden lake. It has been seared into Norway’s national memory; one in four people knew someone who had been hurt, or killed. For the tail-end of summer, 1,700km away in east London, audiences will relive it too.
The show was written by Italian playwright Edoardo Erba in 2015, and has since been staged across Europe, including in his home country, Germany and Greece. When approached by a director to write on the topic, “I wasn’t sure about it, because it was too tragic an event,” he says. But researching the slaughter wreaked by Breivik – a neo-Nazi who set off a bomb in Oslo’s parliament building on 22 July 2011, killing eight and diverting emergency resources to the city centre before travelling to Utøya to continue his killing spree – led him to a story that could explore the anguish.
![People gathering at Oslo cathedral to mourn the 93 people killed in the 2011 terror attacks](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000389944647_17236190144970_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqrpfQw2hJyG_yckwxPAr0gmyy-GsNrhPQbLesooHneHs.jpeg?imwidth=350)
The end result is it being told through three fictionalised pairs - a couple whose daughter is at the camp, two brothers whose home is adjacent to it, and the policemen tasked with responding, rather than recreating the experiences of those caught on the island itself. As Erba says: “Imagine being on the side of the black hole, but not in it.”
I stood on the edge of that black hole myself in the spring, when I travelled to Utøya in a visit organised by the Oslo Center, an NGO pushing for peace. As abysses go, it was beautiful: sunlight streaming through the breaks in the pines, the water around us still. That serenity would become all the more stark walking through the camp in which Breivik (whose name is not used in the country) had punched bullet holes into the walls, where they remain. On the floors in each room were framed photos of the children he had killed in those same spots, crumpled roses in front of them. Among the most harrowing exhibits were the text exchanges between frantic parents and their children on an island under siege, like the messages to 18-year-old Synne Røyneland from her mother: ‘how’s it going’, ‘honey, please answer please,’ ‘honey how are you doing’ – all sent after she had already been killed. “Being at Utøya,” one of the survivors, who did not wish to be named, said, “you get perspective on what a bad day really is.”
Now 31, she was nervous of being put in the spotlight again, more comfortable telling the story she had spent her adult life cultivating for visitors, which was “quite different [to] talking to my boyfriend or family or friends about this day.”
She was 18 when the sound of gunshots started spreading behind her, running as Breivik made it to shore on the boat he had commandeered while dressed as a policeman and fired three shots into the camp leader’s head and back; more than five rounds would kill two guards within the next minute. She ran to the steep cliffs on the side of the island, sliding herself between the rocks as 23 more were killed on the path and in the café building above her, a further 14 slaughtered in the pumphouse, a small block to her right. Her friends were not innocent teenagers but “legitimate targets” to Breivik, who killed approximately one person per minute he was there – future politicians who would go on to preach a kind of left-leaning worldview that he despised.
![Anders Breivik in court in Oslo, April 2012](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000389946524_17236191282280_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq3cNn5dV8M_uiUDluChIdlBlrG-OVvuhlQ7zNna0g5jA.jpeg?imwidth=350)
She was now “at peace,” she told me, with the horrors of that day. But, heavily pregnant, she admitted that her state of near-parenthood had made her reconsider what took place in a new light. “Trying even to imagine that someone would do what he did to my child is just unforgivable,” she said. Of the survivors, many of whom she is still friends with, “we are at the age where we are becoming parents ourselves. And I think there are a lot of people who get a new perspective on just that.”
Since the events of 13 years ago the summer camp has been thrust into its own ethical vortex: tear the place down, or reclaim it as it was intended, to counter the attacker’s hate. The art based on it - which includes the films Utøya - July 22, and 22 July, is prone to a similar split. When the first film was released, she felt that “to capture and show this was right - [extremism] is hate in the purest form, and we have to stand against it.” Others, though, have been less convinced. Should other people’s agony be a source of entertainment? And now, more than a decade on, do we need to be traumatised a second time?
Erba, who describes Utøya as “one of the most dramatic works I have ever written,” believes that “theatre is a ritual, functioning as a mediator with our deepest emotions, and it is able to transform and heal them.” While he felt in some ways an “inadequate” candidate to faithfully recreate what happened, done right, he says that performances on matters of this magnitude “should produce a kind of catharsis.”
![Marco Young and Kate Reid in rehearsal for Utøya at the Arcola Theatre, London](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000389945933_17236191974930_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNJjoeBT78QIaYdkJdEY4CnGTJFJS74MYhNY6w3GNbO8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
When he wrote Utøya almost a decade ago, the threat of the far-right was more abstract, particularly in Norway, which he says in 2011 was “a virgin country raped by terrorists and now it has become like other countries: armed, scared, ready to fight.” Over the years, “the problem of terrorism by the extreme right is something that has begun to be in the soul of every one of us” – something that feels yet more acute in light of recent events.
I enter the Arcola’s rehearsal room in the final days of July, in what would come to be a strange lull between the Southport stabbings that left three children dead, and the hate-fuelled riots that have since swept across the UK. “Since the problem of the far-right in Europe has grown, the message [of the play] hasn’t changed, but perhaps the message touches us more today than then. This fear is more present,” Erba says. The barbarism, the world we live in now, is “like a scar, it can’t go back”.
Erba’s characters cycle through their own fears, prejudices and disbelief on learning of the slaughter - something Runa Røstad Augdal, the team’s Norwegian consultant, says reflects the country at that time. On learning of what had happened, the widespread reaction was: “Norway is so safe... that just hasn’t happened, you’ve got to be wrong.”
She was 13 in 2011 - a year younger than Breivik’s youngest victims - learning from the news and family friends that one of her sister’s classmates was trapped on Utøya. Røstad Augdal remembers clearly how crowded his funeral was; “everyone came. And there was a memorial on the first day of class as well” featuring two songs that, if she hears them now, still give her “chills.”
While what happened has never left her, she sees a need for art to breathe life back into the subject “so that the story doesn’t get forgotten”; even now, if she brings it up with friends, some have buried it deep into the past. “Remembering is just as important in terms of not letting it happen again.”
Utøya is at the Arcola Theatre, London E8 (arcolatheatre.com), until August 31.