Makes you laugh and cry at the same time

Breathe in, breathe out.

It is not dangerous. There you go.

It goes well.

She paces and hyperventilates, talking to herself, as the audience enters and finds their seats. The black stage is framed by red masking tape on the floor, on the stage stands an illuminated, ocher yellow tent that hints at where we are going.

We are going back to Utøya. To what was supposed to be the most beautiful adventure of the summer. What ended up with 69 young people being massacred. We will hear a sister’s story about losing her brother, the story of her who survived but finds it difficult to live.

I feel a resistance somewhere in my stomach as I sit down, not wanting to let in all the bottomless pain that is to come. I don’t know yet that, during the 70-minute monologue, I will laugh as much as I will cry – for all the right reasons.

Because “To live on” is not pitch black. It contains lots of light and heat.

Brave, hard-hitting and warm-hearted

In autumn 2024, the children born in 2011 will start secondary school, the year 22 July took place. They have no memories of their own about that Friday bombed narrowly, about the shots that hit and hit, the brutal images of children swimming for their lives, the panic, the shock, the grief.

It is for them that this show is made. It’s up to the schools.

And screenwriter Nina Wester didn’t have to come up with everything herself. Through conversations with the Linaker family from Bardu, who lost one of their two children who were on Utøya, she has gained an insight into what it is actually like to live on. What it was like running in panic, the sound of feet coming closer, the screams of death and the smell of gunpowder and earth, discovering that blood is not like in the movies, it’s not red, it’s black.

It is therefore not a given that the performance writes itself, it is not a biography. Wester has done a thorough and impressive job of digging into the darkest and looking for the brightest. And the result is brave, hard-hitting and heartwarming.

It seems so true

We get to know the 17-year-old who goes to Utøya with his brother. Learn about their dreams and plans, the tent trip they “bonded” like that for the first time, his ugly perfume, the overly large dragon tattoo and the stupid arguments.

We go with them to Utøya, to the Northern Norway camp and kissing on the Kjærlighetsstien, and to the moment they realized that it was machine guns, not fireworks, they heard.

And we are there the time after. In the hospital where he is kept artificially alive, around the dinner table where it is still set for four even though there are only three now. We are there in the colloquium group when she passes out because someone is drilling in the road outside, and when she breaks up with a guy because life can’t be that good. We are also there when she receives threatening messages from strangers that she should have died on Utøya, that they are coming to take her now.

It is not linear, we go back and forth. Actress Christina Sleipnes talks about this story as if it were hers. That is as far as the task an actor has, nevertheless it is not usual to witness a monologue that seems so true. Sometimes she forgets words, asks the audience what this little firework that you put on the ice at restaurants is called. Shooting stars, someone replies. Yes, it was, yes, did you know that it smells the same as gunpowder?

This is a monologue that requires all layers of emotion, a change of tempo and body, and Sleipnes reaches all the way. She is both comical and frantic, cursed and hurt, and makes us laugh and cry at each other, sometimes at the same time. It never becomes raucous or flat. For that, she deserves a resounding bravo and a round of applause.

Could become cliché

The scenography is delightfully simple. The tent is not only Utøya, it is also her inner space that she closes herself in. The sleeping bags are first friends and delicious chaos, then similar. The lights are both sirens, flashlights and the phones that start ringing. The cardboard boxes are both moving day, new opportunities, and all the bad things you try to pack away, but which still remain in the room.

Perhaps one could have found even more in what is on stage, played with the shadows inside the tent, conjured up some whimsical sound effects, but it is possible that the additional artistic elements would have disturbed the naturalness of the piece. Like putting makeup on a child. Tipped over into becoming cliché.

There are many pitfalls to watch out for when making documentary theater about such a painful, collective tragedy, such a bloody and unjust act of hatred, as July 22 is. It could easily have become too pompous, too political, too instructive and “important”. But “To live on” never goes there. It opens spaces we can enter if we want and can, as real good theater should do.

So go and watch “To live on”. There is nothing to be afraid of. It goes well. I promise.