Mattias Andersson - Vi som fick leva om våra liv

Sliding doors for the theatre. What would you do if you had a second chance, Mattias Andersson wonders and asks. An important figure in Northern European theatre, he is a director and an author, winner of the Ibsen prize in 2007, nominated for the Europe Theatre Prize in 2017 and since 2020 director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. An original exponent of the European theatre movement known as dokumentarstuck or docu-drama, based on documentary investigations and research in the field, Mattias Andersson draws inspiration from personal accounts and studies by sociologists of a socio-economic cross-section of Swedish society to write We who lived our lives over. Weaving History together with so many smaller histories, from the most critical events of our existence to the most minimal and apparently uninfluential ones, Andersson explores the potential of a second chance. From the attack on the Twin Towers to the birth of a baby, through the most banal decision to learn French instead of German in high school. “The merging of all these answers – writes the director – creates a polyphonic performance, both visual and choreographic, that reveals the utopian power of theatre: when social constructs and external circumstances change, no identity, no role in life is predetermined or immutable forever”.