The Icelandic banking crisis as performance art

Oh Icelanders, is there anything you can’t make avant-garde? The Times’ Robert Mackey explains:  Fresh from presenting two plays inspired by the epic collapse of the country’s banks, actors at the Reykjavik City Theatre are in the middle of an ambitious, if not particularly dramatic, effort to read the entire text of a new 2,250-page ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

Oh Icelanders, is there anything you can't make avant-garde? The Times' Robert Mackey explains

Oh Icelanders, is there anything you can’t make avant-garde? The Times’ Robert Mackey explains

Fresh from presenting two plays inspired by the epic collapse of the country’s banks, actors at the Reykjavik City Theatre are in the middle of an ambitious, if not particularly dramatic, effort to read the entire text of a new 2,250-page report on the crisis by a government “truth commission” to the nation.

The reading, which is expected to take at least five days, is being performed by 45 actors, who are playing to a somewhat less than full house in the Icelandic capital, as the video of part of the reading embedded above seems to show. The reading, which is in Icelandic, is also available online to anyone who logs on to watch the continuous live stream.

Why stop at five days? I think it would work much better as a 30-day norse saga with music by Sigur Ros.

During the U.S. healthcare debate, Senator Tom Coburn was briefly threatening to force the entire 2,000 page bill to be read out loud. Maybe the GOP could secure the Reykjavik City Theatre’s services for future filibusters.

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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