It will not be: Hamlet rages in Stockholm against the political closure of a cultural institution | platform

There is something rotten in Swedish theatre. In front of Elverket Station – a former power station that for much of the past 30 years has been a center for experimental dramatic production in Stockholm – posters proclaim that theater is dead. Inside the former Turbine Hall, on either side of a red chandelier-lit platform surrounded by contorted bodies, Hamlet and Ophelia, played brilliantly by Gustav Lind and Gizem Erdogan, channel the wrath of an entire generation, loudly hitting the walls against the bars. In the final seconds of the play, the gravedigger makes way for builders dressed in high-visibility clothing to cover the stage with tarpaulins and get to work.

This adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, which was ambiguously subtitled “The Death of the Stage,” was the venue’s last theatrical production before it closed. Dramaten, the royal dramatic theater that serves as Sweden’s national theatre, has been forced to abandon the venue, which over three decades has become a well-funded home for risky shows and new writing. Among her greatest successes was Personkrets 3:1, a six-and-a-half-hour play written and directed by the late Lars Noren about homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness. Swedish premiere of Sarah Kane’s Purge; and Tusen år hos Gud (A Thousand Years with God), a sprawling dance-opera based on the writings of Stig Dagerman. In 2006, I saw a young star named Noomi Rapace in Keane’s brutally violent play “Blasted Here.”

But the freeze in state funding has now led to a decline in real terms of around SEK 50 million per year since 2017 for Dramaten, which is wholly state-owned. The situation worsened in 2023, when a three-year funding freeze meant they were forced to lay off workers and cut production. In its heyday, Elverket presented up to 10 productions a year. Now, Dramatin can’t afford to pay the rent on Elverket, let alone stage two or three productions there a year.

What form Elverket’s next evolution will take is not yet known. But given the high rents and real estate potential of this vast black box space in the sought-after Östermalm district, its days as a theater were almost certainly over once Hamlet closed in December. “The cultural twilight is underway,” critic Jacob Lundström wrote in Dagens Nyheter. “A few blocks away, the Historic Park Cinema is about to become a gym. What will happen to Elverkit is unclear. Maybe it will become Five Men?”

Across Europe, a combination of funding cuts, culture wars and rising rents is depriving cultural spaces. Stockholm, a city long accustomed to a rich offering of theatre, music and films, is seeing its cultural fabric fraying at the edges. The Dansmuseet dance museum closed its central venue for financial reasons after 72 years in January; The former Maxim Theater reopened last year as a wider cultural venue after having to close for almost two years following a rent increase; Stockholm’s oldest remaining cinema, Zeta, has been forced to launch a fundraising campaign after coming under financial pressure.

While cuts to the arts began under the leadership of the Social Democrats, before the current center-right government took power in 2022 with the support of the far-right Sweden Democrats, the last two years have seen increasing financial pressures on cultural institutions. The current government has also been accused of implementing a “national education project” in the form of a much-criticized “cultural law” that was unveiled in September.

Sweden’s Minister of Culture, Parisa Lilstrand, told me that the government’s culture budget has increased every year since she came to power and that the budget proposal currently on the table includes an additional 300 million Swedish krona for the cultural sector. But she adds: “The stages or places that Dramaten uses are determined by the process itself, and are not regulated by the government.”

Actor Erdogan, who has starred in TV series Caliphate and police dramas Thin Blue Line and The Playlist, says making theater in 2025 feels more like a “resistance force” than ever before.

“It’s here and now, it’s here in the room, we’re experiencing it together,” she says. “Our heartbeats almost synchronize, as it happens in cinema too.” “I’m concerned that if you remove these rooms, you’ll leave a big empty room which is vital for us humans to experience these things together.”

In addition to offering great flexibility in terms of seating and presentation, the Elverket space is also suitable for meetings between people before and after production. After the show, a group of young women approach Erdogan for a chat.

Lind, who played Raskolnikov in Dramaten’s 2022 Crime and Punishment, says the mood is tense on stage. “There is an anti-war message, and there is a cry for help for the state of the world in our production.”

The war background, underscored by the fact that Laertes went to fight rather than study in Paris, resonates strongly in the modern European context – especially in Sweden. Politicians here have spent much of the past two years warning about the need to prepare for potential military conflict.

There is also contemporary currency in the reworking of Ophelia, which has many more words than in the original (Anderson redistributed some of Hamlet’s soliloquies). By sharing the spotlight, Hamlet and Ophelia channel the energy and frustration of an entire generation of young Swedes who face huge structural challenges. One particularly prominent member of this generation, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, that same evening gave a speech to supporters in nearby Sergels Torg after her arrest by the Israeli army.

In his office in the Dramatin Main Theatre, Anderson says Hamlet has resonated with him since he was a teenager. It embodies the youthful sense, he says, of feeling that “everything is corrupt and fake, of feeling that one has to fight back, to do something.” After seeing a version he didn’t like at a festival two years ago, he began experimenting with different Swedish translations and wondered where the modern version would feel at home.

“I started thinking a lot about places in urban areas where there is room to discuss existence, to discuss the eternal questions of humanity through art and theatre,” he says. He wondered: When they are erased, as is the case in many European cities now, will they be missed, and by whom? Is theater as important to society as Anderson and his colleagues believe? This is what brought him to Hamlet as a play that “comes from the primitive depths to be performed for the last time.”

The answer his production provides is, in its own way, not encouraging. In Shakespeare’s original novel, Hamlet stages a play within a play called The Murder of Gonzago, in order to confirm Claudius’ guilt by watching his reaction to a re-enactment of his father’s murder. In Anderson’s version, the play is about injustice, power games, and genocide, but Claudius and Gertrude react to his diatribe with indifference.

Anderson says there is still hope. He explains that the play’s subtitle is a provocation, not a statement. “I don’t believe theaters will die in this way,” he says. In today’s world, in fact, live experiences have a greater ability to leave an impression, which makes him feel hopeful for the future of theater. “Human connection, the analog meeting, is so unique when we are all pulled into our screens.”