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Something is rotten in Swedish theatre. In front of Elverket – a former power station that for much of the last 30 years has been at the centre of Stockholm’s experimental dramatic output – posters proclaim that theatre is dead. Inside the former turbine hall, either side of a red chandelier-lit platform surrounded by contorted bodies, Hamlet and Ophelia, brilliantly played by Gustav Lindh and Gizem Erdogan, are furiously channelling the rage of a generation, loudly hitting the walls with bars. In the play’s final seconds, gravediggers give way to builders dressed in high-vis come in to cover the stage in tarpaulin and start work.
This adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, not so cryptically subtitled The Death of Theatre, is the venue’s last ever theatre production before it is shut down. Dramaten, the royal dramatic theatre that functions as Sweden’s national stage, has been forced to let go of the venue, which over three decades became a well-funded home for risk-taking performances and new writing. Among its greatest hits were Personkrets 3:1, a six and a half hour long play written and directed by the late Lars Norén about homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness; the Swedish premiere of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed; and Tusen år hos Gud (A thousand years with God), a sprawling dance-theatre-opera based on the writing of Stig Dagerman. In 2006, I saw a young Noomi Rapace star in Kane’s brutally violent play Blasted here.
But now government funding freezes have resulted in a real terms decrease of about 50m SEK per year since 2017 for Dramaten, which is fully owned by the state. The situation worsened in 2023, when a three-year funding freeze meant they were forced to make redundancies and cut productions. At its height, Elverket was putting on up to 10 productions a year. Now Dramaten cannot afford to pay Elverket’s rent, let alone to put on two to three productions there a year.
What form Elverket’s next evolution will take is not yet known. But given the high rent and the real-estate potential of this vast black-box space in the desirable area of Östermalm, its days as a theatre are almost certainly over once Hamlet closes in December. “Cultural twilight is under way,” wrote critic Jacob Lundström in Dagens Nyheter. “A couple of blocks away, the historic Park cinema is about to become a gym. What will happen to Elverket is unclear. Maybe it will become a Five Guys?”
Across Europe, a combination of funding cuts, culture wars and rising rents is picking off cultural spaces. Stockholm, a city long accustomed to a rich offering of theatre, music and film is watching its cultural fabric fray at the edges. Dance museum Dansmuseet closed its centrally located venue for financial reasons after 72 years in January; the former theatre Maxim reopened last year as a broader cultural venue after it was forced to close for nearly two years after a rent increase; Stockholm’s oldest remaining cinema, Zita, was driven to launching a fundraising campaign after coming under financial strain.
While arts cuts started under the leadership of the Social Democrats, before the current centre-right government assumed power in 2022 with the support of the far-right Sweden Democrats, the last two years have seen increased financial pressure on cultural institutions. The current government has also been accused of implementing a “nationalist education project” in the form of a much criticised “cultural canon” that was unveiled in September.
The Swedish culture minister, Parisa Liljestrand, tells me the government’s culture budget has increased every year since coming into power and that the budget proposal currently on the table includes an additional 300m SEK to the cultural sector. But, she adds: “Which stages or venues that Dramaten uses is determined by the operation itself, it is not regulated by the government.”
Actor Erdogan, who has starred in the TV series Caliphate, police drama Thin Blue Line and The Playlist, says to make theatre in 2025 more than ever feels like a “force of resistance”.
“It is here and now, it is here in the room, we experience it together. Our heartbeats almost sync, like it can be at the cinema as well,” she says. “I am worried that if you take away these rooms it will leave a big empty room which is vital for us humans to experience these things together.”
As well as offering huge flexibility in terms of seating and staging, Elverket’s space also lends itself to encounters between people before and after productions. After the show, a group of young women approach Erdogan for a chat.
On stage, the mood is charged, says Lindh, who played Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment at Dramaten in 2022. “There is an anti-war message, there is a cry for help for the state of the world in our production.”
The background of war, emphasised by the fact that Laertes goes off to fight rather than to study in Paris, resonates strongly in a modern European context – particularly in Sweden. Politicians here have spent much of the last two years warning of the need to prepare for a possible military conflict.
There’s also contemporary currency in the re-framing of Ophelia, who has significantly more words than in the original (Andersson redistributed some of Hamlet’s soliloquies). Sharing the spotlight, Hamlet and Ophelia channel the energy and frustration of an entire generation of young Swedes faced with huge structural challenges. One particularly prominent member of that generation, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, that same evening addressed addressed supporters in nearby Sergels Torg after being detained by the Israeli military.
In his office at Dramaten’s main theatre, Andersson says that Hamlet has resonated with him since he was a teenager. It captures the youthful sense, he says, of feeling “everything is rotten and fake and feeling that one should react, do something.” After seeing a version he didn’t like at a festival a couple of years ago, he started playing around with different Swedish translations and wondered where a modern version would feel most at home.
“I started to think a lot about places in urban areas where there is room for discussion of existence, discussion of humankind’s eternal questions through art and theatre,” he says. When they are being erased as they are in so many European cities now, he wondered,will they be missed, and by whom? Is theatre as important to society as Andersson and his colleagues believe it to be? Which brought him to Hamlet as a play that “comes forward from primal depths to be performed for the last time”.
The answer his production gives, in its own meta way, is not encouraging. In Shakespeare’s original, Hamlet puts on a play-within-play called The Murder of Gonzago, in order to confirm Claudius’s guilt by watching his reaction to a reenactment of his father’s murder. In Andersson’s version, the play is about injustice, power games, and genocide, but Claudius and Gertrude’s reaction to his diatribe is one of indifference.
There is still hope, Andersson says. The play’s subtitle, he clarifies, is a provocation rather than a statement. “I don’t believe in theatres’ death in that way,” he says. In today’s world, in fact, live experiences have even more power to make an impression, which makes him feel hopeful for theatre’s future. “The human contact, analogue meeting, that is so enormously unique when we all are pulled into our screens.”
