From Stranger Things To Her London Stage Debut: Linnea Berthelsen on Darkling

Whilst Berthelsen has been doing theatre for a long time, this is the Danish star’s first big show, and it’s a one-hander no less. Which means that she is not just playing one girl from the age of seven into her twenties, but every other member of her family as well. To find each character she has leaned on a movement coach for the patient work of building the roles in her body, discovering “ways to come in and out of them”. 

Darkling, by Titas Halder, traces the lives of a community ravaged by the 1984 gas disaster in Bhopal, India. This was the world’s worst industrial accident: over 500,000 people were exposed to the highly toxic gas methyl isocyanate, and thousands were killed. Out of it Halder draws one child, and it was this girl who pulled Berthelsen into the story when she first read it: “the most amazing, energetic, present character that I’ve ever come across”, she says. The disaster comes when the girl is eighteen.

After the Bush, the play will travel to Manchester, Birmingham and Oxford, a small tour Berthelsen wanted badly in order to reach more young audiences. There is something in the play’s account of injustice, she thinks, that is universal, worth putting in front of anyone working out where to aim their own voice. 

With opening night days away and the hours what they are, you might expect nerves. But “There is absolutely no time to panic”, Berthelsen says. “I’m in it”.