øya is an island in the middle of a Norwegian lake where, in July 2011, the Norwegian Labour Party youth wing were holding their annual Summer Camp when neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, two hours after detonating a van full of explosives outside the Prime Minister’s office in Oslo that killed eight people, opened fire and over the next hour killed 69, mainly students, and injured 32.
Italian writer Edoardo Erba’s 2015 play is not directly about the massacre or its perpetrator but about reaction to it and the undercurrent of prejudice and racism that is latent presented through three unconnected pairs of people.
Gunnar and Malin have sent their daughter to the summer camp. He is a teacher who feels morally superior; he thinks his daughter needs something to believe in, while her mother is more concerned about her virginity. When they learn of the massacre, they are desperate to find out if she is safe.
Peter and Inga are siblings with an odd-acting new neighbour; she wants go over and investigate, he may be a xenophobe alcoholic, but he says that’s not how you treat neighbours—but that man’s hoarding fertiliser, and his van now seem to link him to the perpetrator.
Misogynistic and racist Alf and his junior officer Unni, whom he bullies, are police based on the shore of the lake. She wants to respond to the sound of the shooting; he insists they must wait for orders from Oslo headquarters.
Director Sarah Stacey and designer Caitlin Mawhinney stage things simply: bare walls, two chairs at opposite ends of a tablet floor marked out with a rectangle of light. A thin, jagged line is drawn under the table, a hint at the dissension that runs through all three couples. You could miss it, but not the great rift that appears in the table when the news breaks, not just their rift getting wider but the chasm that opens up in society.
Marco Young plays all three men, Kate Reid all three women. There is no change of costume—he in black leather, she sombrely dressed too—and there is no noticeable attempt to differentiate characters, but there’s a taut dynamic between the two of them. Between short scenes, they move slowly around the perimeter sustaining engagement, though only the dialogue indicates which characters they take on when they return to action.
Both actors give intense performances, but Marco Young’s delivery is so fast that it is sometimes hard to catch up with; words spill out with no time to think them. But perhaps that and the sameness are the point. Are you really as free of prejudice and racism and as tolerant as you like to think you are?