Utoya @ Arcola Theatre - Review
A strong core narrative overshadowed by guff. ★★★
At Arcola Theatre until 31st August.
Tickets from £15.
Rating: ★★★
The biggest problem with Utoya is that it is trying to do far too much. The play is just over an hour long and in that time tries to deliver three interpersonal narratives with a healthy dose of commentary on racism and power.
Utoya follows three pairs and how their relationships change in response to the real terrorist attack on a socialist children’s summer camp on the island of Utoya in 2011. Kate Reid and Marco Young each play three characters, with varying success. Malin and Gunnar are a couple with a daughter; Inga and Petter are siblings running a farm; Unni and Alf are police.
Malin and Gunnar are the main story, with the most time and also the starting scene. This narrative is a compelling twist on familiar story, all the failings of a bad relationship brought to the fore by a crisis. If it was the only narrative, it could be Pinter-esque in tension. Barbs are thrown, accusations made, both parts of the couple are deeply flawed; it’s more obvious in Gunnar, who threatens the murder of a cat in the opening scene. An hour of their passive agressive fighting, with the appropriate pauses, would be a tense and engrossing narrative.
Unfortunately, any tension is cut by rapid switches to two other narratives, less well developed and much less subtly executed. Inga struggles with failing health while simple Petter fails to do his work on the farm and grows suspicious of a neighbour, in a story of rural Norway that leans too heavily on folk knowledge and stereotype for something set this century. Alf is the picture of a gross male cop, harrassing his subordinate officer and sticking harshly too the rules despite an unfolding crisis. Both narratives have their moments, but nothing that makes up for what we lose.
There are references to race throughout, centered around the assumption that the attacker was a muslim and the eventual realisation that he was “one of our own”, a Norweigan right-winger. It is important to discuss race in this play, and it is occasionally done well, but often it is ham-fisted and unnaturally shoehorned into dialogue. The few discussions of Socialism are the same.
The cast of two is under a lot of pressure, not only each playing three roles, but having to rapidly and repeatedly switch between them. Young has a particularly tough job, with each of his characters being vastly different. Reid undeniably comes off better. She’s fantastic as Malin, wonderfully navigating the journey from passive aggressive, needling wife to emotions overspilling, and she’s good as Unni too, though moreso in the emotional scenes where the roles are similar. She’s far less convincing trying to handle Inga, the blinkered farmer with a love of tradition and mantras. Young plays Petter well, realistically capturing the scattered emotions of a simple, slow young man under immense stress in a situation he doesn’t fully comprehend. He’s far less convincing in the other two roles- toxic masculinity and sexual misbehaviour may just not be in his range. This is no mark against either actor, it’s a structural problem with the piece.
The costuming is well done, both in minimalistic bland but distinctly Scandi clothing. The staging is a little confused. Arcola does not have a raised stage, and from the start the stage is bounded by four neon strips, but it is inconsistent whether stepping outside of these indicates anything or not. Transitions between scenes come with slow twisting walks that evoke GCSE drama performances more than anything. The only stage dressing is a table and two chairs, perfectly sufficient. The table cracks halfway through, technically a very neat trick, but it’s unclear what it’s punctuating.
Utoya needs a serious rethink, but the choice to zoom in on a domestic scene and to unpick one tiny part of the impact of a terrorist attack is a bold and sound one. I wish it was done more confidently, the impulse to say more makes it far less impactful.