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BREIVIK

Berlin set for Breivik murder monologue

The words of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik explaining the thinking behind his killing spree will be read in Berlin theatres next month. The aim: to shock the audience with the familiarity of his arguments.

Berlin set for Breivik murder monologue
Photo: Heiko Junge/Scanpix

A Turkish-German woman will be reading the script, edited from Breivik’s 17-page, hour-long speech he made in an Oslo court in April before being jailed for 21 years for the 77 murders he carried out last July.

The transcript was never published in full, the judge deeming it unhelpful to give Breivik a public platform and the media shying away from giving his xenophobic, nationalist beliefs too much attention.

Now a German-Swiss political theatre group will stage Breivik's Erklärung – Breivik's Explanation – to give the audience a nasty shock, as director Milo Rau said he feels the speech contains arguments which would find acceptance in much of Europe.

The choice of Sascha Soydan to perform the piece was to detach the Breivik “character” from his arguments, Rau told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

“I am not going for similarity here, but trying to produce an intellectual event,” he told the paper. There will be no courtroom set and the piece will not be dramatised.

“The first thing Sascha Soydan said after reading the script was that the scandal of the text was that it isn't really scandalous,” said Rau.

“It is a relatively rational, self-contained and, I think, widely spread view in Europe.” The major difference being that most people would not go on a killing spree, like Breivik did when he murdered 77 people, mostly teenagers, in Utøya and Oslo last summer.

The 35-year-old director from Bern, Switzerland, suggested that 80 percent of the arguments Breivik put forward in his speech would not be out of place in the conservative Die Weltwoche Swiss newspaper. Around 20 percent could be aligned with views held by the staunchly left-wing German paper the taz, he said.

“There is not a causal, basic relationship between thinking and acting. One cannot say that because a person is a right-wing nationalist, they are a murderer.

“Clearly, he is an unhinged, radical right-wing extremist” but, Rau added, it was Breivik's ability to exercise perspective during his explanation in court that “makes him a rational, complex, but also mundane speaker.”

The performances are part of Rau’s International Institute for Political Murder (IIPM) group’s “Power and Dissent” project, and will be staged along with discussions afterwards, at the Weimar National Theatre on October 19th and in Berlin's Theatrediscounter on October 27th.

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PARIS

Top Paris theatre reopens as Covid occupy movement ends

French actors, stage technicians and other members of the performing arts ended a more-than-two-month occupation of the famous Odéon theatre in Paris on Sunday, allowing the show to go on after this week's easing of Covid-19 curbs.

Top Paris theatre reopens as Covid occupy movement ends
A picture taken on January 26, 2011 in Paris shows the facade of the Odéon theatre. LOIC VENANCE / AFP

The protesters took down the banners they had slung across the facade of the venue in the Left Bank as they left at dawn, leaving just one inscribed “See you soon”.

“We’re reopening!,” theatre director Stéphane Braunschweig exclaimed on the venue’s website, adding that it was “a relief and a great joy to be able to finally celebrate the reunion of the artists with the public.”

The Odéon, one of France’s six national theatres, was one of around 100 venues that were occupied in recent weeks by people working in arts and entertainment.

The protesters are demanding that the government extend a special Covid relief programme for “intermittents” — performers, musicians, technicians and other people who live from contract to contract in arts and entertainment.

READ ALSO: Protesters occupy French theatres to demand an end to closure of cultural spaces

With theatres shut since October due to the pandemic, the occupations had gone largely unnoticed by the general public until this week when cultural venues were finally cleared to reopen.

The Odéon, which was inaugurated by Marie-Antoinette in 1782, had planned to mark the reopening in style, by staging Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece “The Glass Menagerie”, with cinema star Isabelle Huppert as a former southern belle mourning the comforts of her youth.

But the protests scuppered the first five performances, with management saying the venue was blocked — a claim the protesters denied.

“What we wanted was for it (the performance) to go ahead, along with an occupation allowing us to speak out and hang our banners. We don’t want to stop the show,” Denis Gravouil, head of the performing arts chapter of the militant CGT union, said on Sunday.

Two other major theatres — the Colline theatre in eastern Paris and the National Theatre of Strasbourg — have also been affected by the protests.
 
France has one of the world’s most generous support systems for self-employed people in the arts and media, providing unemployment benefit to those who can prove they have worked at least 507 hours over the past 12 months.

But with venues closed for nearly seven months, and strict capacity limits imposed on those that reopened this week, the “intermittents” complained they could not make up their hours.

The government had already extended a year-long deadline for them to return to work by four months.

The “intermittents” are pushing for a year-long extension instead.

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