Edwin Wright is pleased to be returning to Dunedin to play a mass murderer on the stage that gave him a life worth living. The leftwing actor tells Bruce Munro why he believes we need to hear the words and thoughts of far-right killer Anders Behring Breivik.
Edwin Wright had no problem quitting a job he hated in Auckland to join his friends enrolling in university in Dunedin. He also had no clue what to do with his life.
It was the mid-1990s. Wright's long-term goal could be summed up with four letters: get a BA and go on an OE.
But then he auditioned for a couple of roles in the University of Otago's Allen Hall lunchtime theatre programme.
By the end of his first year he had been in seven plays. From his second year, his major was no longer English but theatre studies.
"It is no exaggeration to say that place changed my life,'' Wright enthuses over the phone from Auckland.
"The glorious Lisa Warrington took me under her wing.
"And guys like Richard Huber and Simon O'Connor and David O'Donnell ... It was like I found a nest. It gave me the opportunity to do lots of stuff.
"I feel very grateful because the people there, and that establishment, allowed me to find a thing I really, really loved doing.''
Since then he has worked on stage and screen, supplemented by a sideline in landscape gardening to fill the financial troughs so many actors face.
The past couple of years have been busy. Wright played Skeleton in the award-winning film Turbo Kid. He was Scuzz in Jane Campion's Top of the Lake and played Victor the Hawk, a rival bounty hunter to Michael Fassbender's character in Slow West.
Last year, a timely gap enabled him to pick up the role of Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik in the acclaimed and controversial solo show Manifesto 2083, at The Basement Theatre, in Auckland.
It is a role he is keen to reprise as part of the Dunedin Fringe Festival next month.
"I haven't performed in Allen Hall Theatre since 1999. So, it's going to be a bit of a homecoming, which I'm really excited about. I'm very grateful to go back and take a show which I am quite proud of.''
It is not a play which every actor would be itching to put on their CV. In fact, director-producer Anders Falstie-Jensen was running out of options when Wright came along.
"It was really hard to find an actor who was up for it. Quite a few people said, ‘oh, this is a bit too full-on for me','' Auckland-based Falstie-Jensen, of The Rebel Alliance theatre company, says.
"I was one day away from going, 'I haven't found an actor, I'll have to pull the plug'. But Edwin found it meaty and interesting ... He's extraordinary.''
Manifesto 2083 is an encounter with Breivik, the far-right terrorist who, on July 22 in 2011, killed 77 people and wounded 200 in the Norwegian capital Oslo and on the island of Utoya.
Before the terror attack, Breivik sent out a 1500-page manifesto containing racist propaganda, philosophical reflections, bomb manuals and interviews he conducted with himself and diary entries of his preparations for the attack.
A year later, Danish theatre-makers decided to create a play based on his manifesto.
The play caused a lot of debate, including a television poll on whether it should be allowed to go ahead. It did proceed and was well-received by audiences in Denmark, Norway, Germany and Greece.
Falstie-Jensen, who emigrated to New Zealand from Denmark in 2001, tried to attend a performance during a visit to Denmark but was unable to get tickets. He did, however, direct a reading of the play for the Auckland Theatre Company.
Last year, he produced and directed the first full staging of Manifesto 2083 outside Europe.
"In Denmark, it was very much about the man Breivik,'' Falstie-Jensen says. "In a New Zealand context, however, it becomes less about him and more about isolation, the desire to be part of a greater cause and the ease with which one can become radicalised.''
It is a process play that draws the audience into Breivik's world.
It opens with Wright as Danish playwright Olaf Hojgaard explaining the research that went into creating the play.
"It is almost like a slow fade. At the end of the show he is completely gone and you're just left with Breivik in the room ... It is quite scary.
"Wright is fearless. It is quite full-on to portray someone like this ... to look the audience in the eye and say some quite nasty stuff.''
But worthwhile and important, Wright says.
"It's a very confronting play, dealing with issues that are very pertinent to the global situation at the moment, in terms of immigration and race relations and the conflicts between religions.
"It forces you to confront some ideas ... which you ignore at your peril.
"There is no way to justify what he did. What he did was abhorrent and disgusting, unforgivable. But when you start to really look at this material ... dispassionately and objectively, there are parts where you go 'well, you're not wrong'.
"It's my belief that by ignoring this ... you create people like Anders Breivik.''
The play
• Manifesto 2083 is on at Allen Hall Theatre, University of Otago, March 10 to 12 at 8pm.
