Anne-Cécile Sibué-Birkeland has not had a day off since January.
She receives us at the Black box theater in Oslo, where she has been the manager for three years.
- We are really behind the conviction that art should iron hair.
Art should be able to be controversial, create debate and shake up the prevailing consensus, says Sibué-Birkeland about the play that rocked Norwegian politics.
- So we have stuck to those principles and at the same time needed to deal with how safety is to be guaranteed for our audience and for ourselves.
Constantly, almost daily, there has been a flow of threats, she says.
It was in November last year that Black box theater staged the play Ways of seeing, an external production created by director Pia Maria Roll.
In the play, "the networks that have an interest in making Norway a more racist society have been mapped".
One theme is surveillance, and images of several politicians' homes are displayed on a screen on stage.
Among others, the Progress Party and former Minister of Justice Tor Mikkel Wara's house.
Caused outcry
Tor Mikkel Wara's cohabitant reported the theater director and the artists behind Ways of seeing to the police.
She wrote in a newspaper article that her family had been subjected to a "violation of privacy".
At the same time, their home was the subject of several attacks, and the incident became a major story in the Norwegian media.
Aftenposten's theater critic Per Christian Selmer-Anderssen is one of quite a few Oslo residents who actually saw Ways of seeing.
In his review, he describes the actors as observers of a Norwegian society in which they are never allowed to participate.
- When the Minister of Justice is mentioned, the actors tell that they come to his house to film it.
The house is not easily identified, there are mostly a few bushes.
They do not tell which street it is, they do not film people, says Per Christian Selmer-Anderssen and continues:
- But they tell about Tor Mikkel Wara, and not in such positive terms.
To them, he is a kind of "nemesis", he represents a government they do not support.
- But they do not call him a racist and they do not mention any of his family members, and that is one of the misunderstandings that has arisen after Ways of seeing.
As I write in my review: The show tells as much about the activists as about the people they monitor.
The scandal turned around
But the story took a bizarre turn in mid-March, when the Minister of Justice's cohabitant was arrested by the police, suspected of having set fire to the couple's car in a fake hate attack.
And now she is suspected of having staged all the threats directed at them.
The crisis has escalated in recent weeks, and this week led to Tor Mikkel Wara resigning as Norway's Minister of Justice.
Both opposition politicians and theater director Anne-Cécile Sibué-Birkeland have demanded an apology from Prime Minister Erna Solberg, who has openly criticized Black box theater.
But when the issue was raised in the Storting this week, she stood by her statements.
- It is both fascinating and disturbing to see how many politicians started commenting on the play without even having seen it.
It is a violation of freedom of expression, says Anne-Cécile Sibué-Birkeland.
- That I was notified of suspicion of crime… it has not happened since World War II.
That a theater director is so accused.
Per Christian Selmer-Anderssen agrees that the debate about the play has mainly been conducted by people who have not seen it.
- As a theater critic, I have reacted a bit to the fact that it seems that people see theater as a debate post in the newspaper.
Who must follow press ethics rules that the other should be allowed to speak, or that everything that is said on stage is true.
That is not the case, he says.
Kulturnyheterna has sought the Progress Party for a comment, but they have declined to comment on the issue.