Theatre as a place of healing....

(The Norwegian Queen Jesus comes home)

How strange and beautiful it was on Thursday to walk through the streets of Grimstad, this tranquil and well ordered town in South Norway.

This town where Ibsen worked as an apothecary’s assistant when he was a young man, this place which I suspect became the model for the stifling hypocritical small towns that figure so strongly in his plays.

This strongly Christian town where the first church they built quickly became too small. So they took it to pieces, being thrifty and careful people, and reassembled it in a suburb. The new church seats a thousand people and is the third largest wooden church in Norway.

Which is remarkable, since this is not that big a town; but there seems to be a legacy of god fearing respectability in its impeccable streets leading down to its harbour and its sheltered access to the open sea.

Its stability, its roundedness, its sense of being a place where responsible and civic minded citizens go about their business in the present…. all this helped me as my phone kept beeping with news of the madness and continual folly of a UK ruling class trying to live out its grotesque visions of the past.

Spending even a few days in this prosperous well-ordered country makes me so painfully aware of how impoverished my country has become. Of how in their years of power the Conservatives have not conserved, but have destroyed: destroyed our health system, our education system, our legal system, our transport system, our broadcasting system and all the frameworks that once sustained our cultural life.

This party that for years ignored the epidemic of sexual abuse of our children and now is causing so many to go hungry.

This party that, not content with destroying social care provision of our elders, is about to make many of us die of cold.

This party that, having just chosen a manifestly incompetent prime minister, has just driven her out of the office and is now, unbelievably, seriously considering re-instating the manifestly corrupt, mendacious incompetent they so recently expelled.

And here I am, in the beautiful and well ordered home of my kind hosts in this well-ordered town…

Contemplating in shock and disbelief the destruction of my country.

So that is one strand of today’s story.

The other is gratitude.

My hosts are Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad, and her life partner Elsa Almås; one of the many beauties of their house is their garden theatre, the Hageteateret.

It was never a fruitful part of the garden, Esben Esther explained to me, it was always muddy and they didn’t quite know what to do with it.

Perhaps build a toolshed? But they already had a toolshed.

So they built a theatre.

It seats 50, it has lights and a grape vine that winds its tendrils across the top of its tiny stage.

Like the house it is a part of, it is magical and beautiful and welcoming; and it was there that last night I saw Esben Esther, the Norwegian Queen Jesus, perform my play after her triumphant opening at the theatre festival in Hamar in September.

Esben Esther and Elsa are public intellectuals, a kind of person that scarcely exists in anti-intellectual Britain; and together, as professors, they study and research sexology in the nearby University of Agdar.

This is a discipline that in Britain is not allowed to openly exist. Its few researchers and fewer courses disguise themselves in health faculties.

Yet a sane society would give pride of place to the study of how sexuality relates to healthy relationships and to human happiness.

I can’t help but reflect on how such a study would have helped those wretched unhappy people who were once part of our government. The ex-Home Secretary whose lack of empathy expressed itself in the shocking cruelty of her wish to deport refugees and asylum seekers to Rwanda.  The ex-Prime Minister whose wooden delivery as she resigned revealed her to be someone utterly out of touch with her own feelings, her own voice, and her own body. And all this, coupled with a catastrophic lack of self knowledge has led her and our country to disaster.

When I wrote “The Gospel According to Jesus Queen Of Heaven” way back in 2008, it was part of a project to create work that would do more than share stories of personal and social distress.

I wanted it to be work that promotes healing. And that is the kind of work I still want to create.

Esben Esther is the child of this town’s doctor; and for many years she has been, and continues to be, a popular and respected GP here. Elsa, too, is renowned as a therapist.

Surely that contributes to the special atmosphere of their home: because it is also a place of healing.

And that makes it all the more fitting and beautiful to be with her as she performs in their garden theatre, here in the bible belt of Norway.

Where she carries on her work on healing in a different dimension.

Here, where she brings her Queen Jesus home.