The Events

The Events / tackles the most difficult question to answer in the aftermath of a massacre: why? When a gun-toting teenager, consumed by thoughts of cultural purity, targets a vicar’s choir, she becomes obsessed with trying to understand him and his actions. Could he have been stopped?

Two actors examine the vicar’s compulsion to understand mass murder, while an onstage choir gives voice to her outrage as she demands answers from friends, her lover and the boy-killer himself.

The Events, which premiered at Edinburgh Festival in 2 is playwright David Greig’s response to the violence unleashed by a Norwegian white supremacist in 2011. This Australian production, starring Catherine McClements, features a different Melbourne choir each night, as it questions whether there are limits to our capacity for understanding and seeks to explain why events / that are unthinkable, are the hardest to put behind us.

***

The Events was written as a response to the 2011 massacre in Norway. Devastatingly, this story is still as relevant today as it was five years ago. Our thoughts are with the friends and family of the victims of the recent 2016 attack in Orlando, USA.