Den dagen da håret brakk* (The day the hair broke)

Den dagen da håret brakk* (The day the hair broke) was about double standards. Through descriptions of attraction, love and sexuality, the play introduced death and violence as elements of danger.

The stage designers Line Hvalbye and Anna Karin Rynander included video installations in their stage design. This had not been done by The Arctic Theatre before this production.

Terje Nordby wrote the following, among other things, in the article Miraklet på Bjølsen. Tanker rundt et møte med Dario Fo (literally: The Miracle at Bjølsen. Thoughts on a meeting with Dario Fo), from Norsk dramatisk årbok 1998 (literally: Norwegian dramatic yearbook 1998):
"The autumn of '83 we had [...] an adamant, but undefined aim. We wanted to meet Dario Fo and to learn from him, in a project hopefully developing into a play. The starting point was a text I had written with basis in a theme or framework of an idea, a plot set in a landscape of prostitution and porn. [...] The result, in other words, was the first draft for a play, a kind of tragic farce, rather restricted by rules, structured chronologically. I don't remember the details, and the manuscript was forgotten at a rail station or another in Northern Italy. At the time, the collaboration with Fo had taken off. The story was fast on its way into different spheres.

Practically, his supervising function worked as follows: We met him for the sake of verbal working sessions in restaurants and hotel receptions near where he toured: Padova, Monfalcone, Trieste and other Northern Italian towns. He commented on the story, provided criticism and suggested alternative solutions. After day one, we thought that he had only said brilliant things. Naturally, we started the second day with great eagerness. He had forgotten all he had said the day before, and when we reminded him, he thought it all trivial and found greater joy in starting over, using his imagination. Now, we found this new material brilliant, as we thought about it, the previous had not been all that brilliant after all.

[...]

The spring of 1984 I went to Oslo and shut myself into a borrowed flat to finish the manuscript. [...] I sat in Bjølsen and meant to crown this whole process with Norwegian drama of a wholly new, unknown kind. That became too much. I felt paralysed. [...] All of a sudden, I felt an unstoppable urge to write a play after all, a different play. I started writing my new play, the way I wanted to, without any thought of achieving anything else than what I found interesting there and then. The characters began to live their own lives, and I let them. It took me 24 hours, food breaks included.

[...]

Afterwards, I understood that Dario Fo had taught me the most important thing I have learned from anybody: To give up writing according to a certain standard, whether the standard belongs to the audience, a political agenda, the head of the theatre, the market, the wallet, the taste of the day, the company, the critics, Arts Council Norway or the fascination for a dramatic idol."

(The text is published with permission from Terje Nordby.)

SOURCES:

The Arctic Theatre, ht.tr.no, 01.06.2013, http://www.ht.tr.no/index.php/theatre/showview?iShowID=9 /      26.06.2107, http://halogalandteater.no/produksjon/den-dagen-da-haret-brakk

Terje Nordby, Miraklet på Bjølsen. Tanker rundt et møte med Dario Fo (literally: The Miracle at Bjølsen. Thoughts on a meeting with Dario Fo), from Norsk dramatisk årbok 1998 (literally: Norwegian dramatic yearbook 1998)

*Not yet translated into the English. The title within parentheses is the Norwegian title's literal meaning.

Erling Steenstrup, date unknown, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation:
"One can make rather biting pieces, of the kind that grabs hold of the audience, about sexual lives and the industry surrounding the same. The Arctic Theatre has not made such a play. That it can be real funny to sit in a café, laughing oneself silly from good actors performing a revue about the same subject is a wholly different story."