A new subscription card for the National Theatre: “Too good to be true!”

Translation: Colin Fisher

IN SEPTEMBER, the National Theatre came out with a revolutionary subscription card for young people between the ages of 15 to 25, which the students at Háskóli Íslands should consider acquiring as soon as possible. The new yearly card costs only 1.450 krónur a month, is valid for ten months, and allows unlimited entry to every performance.

Card holders do not need to decide in advance what performance they would like to attend. Instead, the tickets are booked on the day of the performance. “It’s really too good to be true, but it’s true,” says Magnús Geir, the director of the theatre, in a conversation with a journalist from Stúdentablaðið, who visited the theatre and talked to two young and promising actors at the theatre, Ebba Katrín Finnsdóttir and Sigurbjartur Sturla Atlason, along with Magnús Geir.

Theatre nowhere as popular as in Iceland

“We who work in theatre in Iceland are incredibly lucky,” Magnús Geir says, “because Icelanders love the theatre and always have. There are few other countries in the world where going to the theatre is so common. More or less everyone goes to the theatre at some time, while in most other countries it’s maybe only a small elite within society that attends the theatre.”

“This changes the theatre here a lot, because we are talking about a broad group, and we’re thankful for that. Because of that we can perhaps have more influence than others can let themselves dream of, and that is of course what we want, we who work in theatre, to tell stories that matter, that touch upon contentious topics and that ask difficult questions.”

“I think the theatre has seldom been more important than it is now. With the arrival of smartphones, we’re often in our own world, stuck on the phone, alone with our device, but the theatre is one of the few places where we all agree to put the phones down and are just in the same place to experience something special together.”

Streaming platforms: taking the bull by the horns

After the arrival of streaming services such as Netflix and others, there has been more competition for attention. Movie houses have suffered from it and often need to restrict their offerings, but Magnús considers that this competition does not have to damage the theatre if the cards are played right. “This calls for us to think: what is special about the theatre? What do we have that streaming services don’t? We have the fact that we can be together, and there’s a kind of energy hidden in that being together that we can work with.”

“Sometimes the theatre has tried to mimic the movies or television, but that’s maybe not the place where we have to be today. Rather, we need to concentrate on what makes the theatre special. And when that succeeds, the audiences experience this: that there is something powerful that is genuinely happening now, here, that I could never experience at home, in front of the television or a screen.”

Low-cost open card for young people

A yearly discount card has been on offer at the National Theatre for a long time, but the new unlimited card has different features and will be more affordable for young people. 

“Before this we had two options for theatre guests: they could either buy tickets to a particular show or they could buy a card that gave access to four or more predetermined shows. That foundation is living a good life is designed for all viewers.”

“But then we knew that there was a group of young people where many individuals are great fans of the theatre. They also have enough time, they’re not piled on with children and they are free in the evenings and thus can go out often and are interested in theatre, but the problem for a large part of this group is just money. Though the theatre in Iceland is not expensive compared to other countries, it’s still too expensive for many people in this age group, and that prevents them from going as often as they would like.”

“Another consideration is that this group is maybe not as excited to book tickets for certain shows many months in advance, because life goes faster for them. People are willing and able to jump in and are maybe used to other patterns of consumption that more resemble subscriptions, like the streaming services offer. We have decided that we want to open the theatre and make it more accessible to this group, and the result is this card, but by doing so we are pushing the price very far down. This is really too good to be true, but still true. We have had a good response to this card and I have the feeling that the proportion of younger theatre-goers will increase a lot with it.”

Let her dreams come true after studying engineering at HÍ

Ebba finds it easy to put herself in the shoes of students at Háskóli Íslands, as she herself studied engineering at the university before she went to drama school. “Engineering didn’t suit me, and my passions drew me to acting.”

“Bjartur and I are both contracted for one year at a time at the National Theatre, so we always have enough to do at least to the end of the year, but many actors are freelancers and so there’s some uncertainty that comes with this job.”

“It’s like a sport. There’s a lot of drive, you have to be on your feet all day as an actor, and you have to be able to rehearse six hours a day and then perform at night, sometimes up to five hours extra. The theatre owns you all day, every day except on holidays and in summer.”

“An actor has to rehearse from ten to four every work day and then you start performing on the weekends and sometimes in the evenings on weekdays,” Bjartur says. “And then you start rehearsing for the next play two months later. Sometimes a play is being performed while the next is being rehearsed. Then you have to rehearse from ten to three, get a little bit of rest for two hours, and then come back again at five or six for the performance of the night.”

A critique of the legal system in the form of a solo performance

Ebba Katrín Finnsdóttir and Sigurbjartur Sturla Atlason are both contracted actors at the National Theatre. They graduated from Listaháskóli Íslands around the same time and acted together in Romeo and Juliet, which was a big hit several years ago. Ebba is now preparing herself for the play Prima Facie, which will premier in November, while Sigurbjartur plays the main role in Phaedra’s Love. Ebba and Bjartur told us about these plays in a conversation with Stúdentablaðið.

“Prima Facie is a solo piece that was first staged in 2019 in Sydney in Australia. It is written by Suzie Miller, who worked as a lawyer for a long time and was a defence counsel in sexual assault cases. Along with this job, she wrote plays and more, but at the end she left the lawyering profession behind. She felt that the environment was not friendly to victims and was pessimistic as to the likeliness of system change, so she decided to write this play to try to push forward those changes in the legal system that she thought were necessary. She had the belief that the theatre could change the world.”

“The play tells the story of Telma, who is a young lawyer and defence counsel in sexual assault cases, like the playwright herself. She is a true workhorse, has a great deal of faith in the system, and quickly works her way up the social ladder. But then she is assaulted and then we see how she goes through the same system she was working for, except as a victim instead of a defender, and then we get to consider both of these sides.”

Always challenging to execute works for Icelandic circumstances

“The play has been very popular in the United States and broadly around the world, and the most remarkable thing is that this piece has become mandatory viewing for judges in Northern Ireland, that is to say all students who want to work as judges have to see this play, as a kind of practice in solidarity and empathy.”

“What we need to do when we perform this kind of work for an Icelandic public is decide whether we should localise it and use it to mirror the situation in the Icelandic legal environment or not. We have to find some areas of contact for the Icelandic audience so they can see themselves in the work in some way.”

“One of the things we have to consider for ourselves now is the jury. In Iceland there is no jury in the legal system, instead there is just a single judge, and if we are going to localise the work, then we need to take this jury out and change the text as well, but that has not been decided yet.”

A provocative work based on Greek mythology

The work that Bjartur is performing in, Phaedra’s Love, is older and much different than the play that Ebba is preparing. It also deals with sexual violence, but the approach is completely different.

“This play was written in Britain in the nineties. It was written at a time when there were many new plays being performed and they were very specific and violent. That was definitely the trend in Britain at the time and some of them maybe didn’t age that well, but Phaedra’s Love has aged better than many other works.”

“Sarah Kane wrote the play when she was only twenty-five years old. The story is based on a Greek myth about Queen Phaedra, who was in love with her stepson Hippolytus. The father of Hippolytus isn’t home, and everything goes to the devil.”

“There is an ancient Greek tragedy that deals with this same story but it is very formal, in verse, with a choir and all of that, but Kane’s play is a much freer adaptation of this tragedy and turns the parts on their head. The story hasn’t been localised, it’s not clear in the play where and when the story happens, and the text is in modern language.”

“In the original myth, the queen was in love with Hippolytus because the goddess Aphrodite cursed her, but in this version that explanation doesn’t exist, so it’s up to the viewer to decide what’s going on in the background.”

Standup, cabaret, and improvisation in the National Theatre cellar

Prima Facie and Phaedra’s Love are only two shows of many that are on offer in this theatre season, and in addition to the traditional performances the theatre offers more light-hearted entertainment in the theatre cellar.

“There is also a varied program in the cellar and a considerably different texture to the performances,” Magnús Geir says. “They can be of all kinds: standup, cabaret, matinee theatre, and improv are examples. People come there and sit at a table and have a drink in hand, and it’s a different experience.”

The theatre season 2023-2024 promises to be a good one, and culture-hungry students will undoubtedly take advantage of what the National Theatre has to offer.