INTO THE DARKNESS

This summer David Greig has gone from a show about a magic sweet factory to one about mass murder. Business as usual, he tells Susan Mansfield

IF GOOD theatre is about light and shade, try this. Drury Lane Theatre in London’s West End: a technical rehearsal for Sam Mendes’ musical version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. While the stage is full of singing and colour and technical high jinks, David Greig sits in the darkness of the stalls, hunched over his laptop writing a play about mass murder.

“Actually, it felt very natural,” says Greig, mildly. The Scottish playwright wrote the adaptation for the musical, which opened in June to broadly favourable reviews. “In fact, if I hadn’t had a play to write I’d have had to invent one, because it would have been maddening to sit there not being able to do anything to the play in front of me. It felt like oddly the right thing, just to be completely not in the same territory, writing a play for grown-ups, with very dark themes.” They don’t come much darker than

The Events, set in the aftermath of an atrocity – something like Columbine, or the shootings at Utoya Island in Norway, or the Boston marathon bombing. It asks questions about why disaffected young men choose to kill – are the causes political, social, spiritual? – and what happens to those left with the consequences.

Greig says it may be the hardest thing he has ever written. Hard to imagine your way into the head of someone who wants to kill. Hard to see your lengthy text – “about 500 pages of fragments” – cut down in rehearsals to 55. Hard when newspapers get hold of it and run a story saying you are writing a musical about Anders Breivik (perpetrator of the Utoya massacre). “This headline was being re-tweeted in seven or eight languages around the world, and I hadn’t even written the play. It was horrible.”

He explains that his story is fictional, but that he and director Ramin Gray of Actors Touring Company did travel to Norway and met some of the people affected by the killings. That, too, was emotionally gruelling. “Norway is the size of Scotland, population-wise, and the young people (at the Utoya summer camp) came from all across Norway. If you imagine that scale of event happening in Scotland, with children drawn from all around the country, everybody would know somebody.”

However, seeing one of the ostensibly more liberal countries in Europe struggling to come to terms with Breivik’s actions (he was deemed fit to stand trial and has been sentenced to 21 years’ imprisonment, Norway’s maximum) got Greig thinking about our well-meaning determination to understand the underlying causes of atrocities.

“There’s a Daily Mail line, which is ‘String ’em up, that’s all they deserve’, and a liberal line which is ‘No, we need to understand the causes’. I think the play interrogates both of these and finds both of them wanting.”

Claire, Greig’s protagonist, is in the desperate-to-understand camp. A priest who has seen a terrible tragedy wreaked on her community choir, she is determined to find a way to explain what has happened, to have compassion on “Boy”, the nameless perpetrator. Their encounter is played out against a background of the singing of community choirs – a different group for each performance, functioning almost like a Greek chorus, part performers, part audience. It is, Greig says, “a show which is interested in religion and religious ritual because, when you’re dealing with these sorts of topics, these are natural subjects to come up”. As much as telling a story, it “aims to create a space for reflection”.

He continues: “In a Greek play, this would be about a woman’s obsessive search for revenge on the perpetrator of this massacre of the community. My play is a woman’s obsessive search for understanding, but I find that to be every bit as destructive and overwhelming as the compulsion for revenge. And every bit as interesting, and every bit as deluded.

“Claire wrestles with darkness and tries to make it go away. And that’s me as well – I don’t like darkness, I prefer light. But if there’s to be any integrity in one’s writing, you have to go towards the darkness, otherwise it’s not very valuable if you happen to find some light. I think this is certainly the most full-on attempt that I’ve made to go towards darkness, to see if I can’t wrestle something redemptive from it. And I’m not sure if it does, I don’t know.”

The show asks whether it is possible to move on after witnessing life-changing

I almost want to stand at the door and say, do you really want to go see this? Really?”