Local horror

Long before making its debut on the Traverse stage this week, The Events had already earned the opprobrium of the British press. Starting with a misleading headline in The Observer, the story that some tactless artsy airheads were exploiting the Utoya tragedy—the 2011 mass shooting at a summer camp on a tiny Norwegian island—made its way around the globe back in March. "NOW IT'S ANDERS BREIVIK THE MUSICAL!" thundered the Daily Mail in typically understated fashion.

This narrative, though, couldn't be further from the truth. Penned by David Greig, one of the UK's finest playwrights, The Events is a dark, thoughtful but fictional work that looks at how society picks itself up after a terrible tragedy and takes as its setting a choir practice in rural Scotland.

Ramin Gray, the show's director, says the play "is as much about Utoya as it is about Dunblane, as it is Boston, as Woolwich, as Columbine, as 9/11, as 7/7 and a whole list of other events. The purpose of the piece is to say that we have so many strategies for coping with these things, from the Daily Mail approach of saying 'The perpetrators are all evil, string 'em up!' to The Guardian saying 'His mother abused him, he was abandoned as a child,' or that there were political reasons and are generally reluctant to condemn. And so the question is whether either of these two paths is the true path."

"I've always been the kind of person that when terrible things happen, I want to know why," says Greig, whose past Fringe hits include Midsummer and Damascus, and whose most recent successes include Dunsinane and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. "I've always felt the need to understand. John Major said [in response to the murder of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993] 'We should condemn more and understand less.' Well, I'm the opposite of that. But I thought it would be interesting to write a play where the impulse to understand is dangerous and destructive."

"That's what this play is about," adds Gray. "And it's why the Utoya: The Musical stuff is so far from what we're doing."

The Events was first conceived some two years ago during a barroom conversation between Gray and Greig, a matter of weeks after the Utoya massacre took place. The pair, who had worked together previously on the 2005 production American Pilot, both had Breivik's crime on their minds and decided that it raised questions that needed exploring. 

"So we went off on this trip to Norway that October," says Gray. "On the first day we met a very charismatic, wonderful female priest. We also went to a community choir rehearsal on the outskirts of Oslo. We'd spent so much time reading and meeting people and talking about all the trauma that there was something really releasing about sitting in a room full of people singing Andrew Lloyd Webber songs. It was pretty dull in one sense, but incredibly reassuring in another sense. David and I turned to each other halfway through and said 'Here's our play.' This was the best riposte to a guy shooting a bunch of people on an island: another bunch of people getting together in a room to sing not-very-good music. They're together, and that's really important."

For Greig, researching the piece threw his own deeply held convictions into turmoil. "I think of myself as an almost impeccable and extreme liberal," he says. "So it was disconcerting because there I was suddenly finding my inner 'hang 'em and flog 'em' side.

"There was a moment when we were in Norway and it was explained to me that the maximum amount of time [Breivik] could be in prison for was 21 years, and that is the maximum possible sentence he could receive. That drove me mad! I said: 'That's ridiculous, you must be joking. Your country's insane! How could you possibly let this guy out after 21 years?' And I was quite shocked at my own reaction because this is their justice system and you can't change it for just one person."

A similar moment of ideological angst presented itself in June this year when the notorious Moors Murderer Ian Brady made a bid to be moved from a psychiatric hospital to prison so that he could starve himself to death. "The people we were rehearsing with were a bit surprised," says Greig "because again I did find my inner hang 'em and flog 'em merchant. I was saying 'Whatever he wants, do the opposite. If he wants to die, keep him alive.' It was a viciousness, an imaginative viciousness and I thought 'Where has this come from?' That's primal, really primal, and it might not be a bad idea to recognise it.

"Whether its Woolwich or Newtown or Boston, what these events do is to throw a little moral hand grenade into the middle of society and it's something that we have to respond to. And it's not a good thing that that happens – it's a really troubling thing and it changes us."