EMAIL: Sveinung Oppegaard (Oslo)

The following email was sent to Nassim Soleimanpour following a performance of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit in Oslo.

Hello.

First, I want to thank you for a beautifully written and beautiful "letter"!

As you must have guessed already, I was given the honourable assignment of being no. 5 in your play, which I will come back to later in MY letter to YOU.

I have seen a handful of plays with a political/moral message, but none of them have spoken directly to me the way you do in your letter. The fact that you leave the play COMPLETELY open for ANYTHING to take place within the frame you preset for the play, was immensely powerful - here is where "being no.5" comes in. The fundamentally most powerful moment in the play for me was when the actor has the two glasses beside her, one of which I have "poisoned" with my own hands. Even though I was sure she hadn't changed them when we closed our eyes I had NO way to be 100% sure.

So I was faced with an immense moral dilemma, should I stop the actor, or should I let her drink from the glass I am 98.8% sure is the safe glass?

IF she drinks from the poisoned glass, I will become a killer! I was the one to pour the poison, I stirred it out and I put the glass back on the table!

What baffled me was that the solution to the dilemma didn't appear until the END of the show, which by the way was presented to me by you, DON'T fill the glass with poison. If this is something I had to do to keep the play going, well, I would drink both glasses myself. But none of these solutions is to any use if I can't make a Choice for myself, to actually DO one of the two, and this is what moved me so. I have started a journey within myself to change the passive and opinionated SPECTATOR in me, to an active, opinionated participator.

I truly hope you are alive and well! Your country and people need you, the world needs you, to keep your message ongoing and give us more beautiful and meaningful letters!

Thank you for lighting the lamp over a - up until now - closed door!

Best wishes, and hope to keep in touch!

Sveinung Oppegaard

Oslo, Norway