Bjarni Snæbjörnsson is cracking open his adolescent diaries once more, and Iceland gets front-row seats. After a two-year pause (and a roller-coaster stint at the Edinburgh Fringe), his hit one-man musical “Góðan daginn, faggi” returns for a summer encore, still fizzing with the gleeful cringe and gut-punch honesty that made queer audiences across the country feel seen. But Bjarni isn’t content to live in the past.
With theatre production co Stertabenda, he’s also leaping into a dystopian tomorrow where Pride is a museum relic and drag queens are reduced to tea-stained footnotes. Skammarþríhyrningurinn (The Triangle of Shame) premieres in October, aiming squarely at the culture war’s endgame with Black-Mirror bite and camp swagger. We caught up with Bjarni to talk diary confessions, translating trauma, and why queer stories belong in queer hands. Spoiler: you’ll want tickets to both shows; before the thought police get there first.
GayIceland: So Audiences in Iceland are lucky enough to get a return run of your one man show ‘Góðan daginn, faggi’, for those who haven’t seen it yet, give us a bit of a synopsis.
Bjarni: “Well the play is about me. My favourite subject (laughs). It is based on my diaries, journals and letters that I wrote when I was a kid and teenager. I found a box full of them around eight years ago and decided that the things I found were so funny and awkward and weird that I really wanted to make a piece of theatre out of them. So I had this idea about making it a one-man musical. Then two of my friends decided they wanted to join me in this project.
It took a really long time to make because it was basically me unpacking all my queer trauma and putting it into writing. A lot of things happen to us as queer people. Sometimes it’s overt discrimination, marginalisation or even just direct violence; but all of us also have memories of things that are a bit more subdued. Like things happen to us that aren’t blatant attacks, but they’re sitting there under the surface of other things. Because it happens to us every day, it’s easy to start feeling numb to it or even stop realising it’s happening altogether. All of this had to come out of the woodwork in the writing process.”
What do they actually want? These people who ban books, who say we’re unnatural?
GayIceland: How did audiences respond to the show after the first run?
Bjarni: “The feedback from the first couple of times we did the show was insane. It seemed to really resonate with people, especially the queer audiences here in Iceland. We ended up showing it for two years and travelled around the country with the National Theatre.
We even did it for teenagers from ages 16 to 19 for a whole winter. We also did a one-off show on the big stage with a choir. We then translated it into English and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023.”
GayIceland: What was it like performing both in Edinburgh and in English?
Bjarni: “Edinburgh Fringe is insane. It’s the most insane arts festival in the world. Imagine all the work you have to do to promote a show in a festival; well Edinburgh is like ten times that.
It was interesting to translate it into english. I thought it would be really easy. I have a BA in English and I’ve lived in Australia and America so I thought it would be a piece of cake. It was actually quite difficult. First, translated nuances that are really Icelandic can be difficult.”
[For non Icelandic readers, Bjarni isn’t wrong. There are many words and expressions in Icelandic that have no direct, or sometimes even close translation in English. Just as a small example; there’s a word in Icelandic for when the weather outside looks nice, but if you go out into it you discover it’s actually not. The word is Gluggaveður; a direct translation of that to English is ‘window weather’ – but without knowing the context there’s no way someone who’s not Icelandic would understand this. So any time an Icelander has really taken the time to make a piece of work available in English, remember it wasn’t easy.]
We need to take the reins of our own stories
Bjarni: “Translating the show was also difficult because languages don’t always reside in the same parts of the brain. So after the show was translated I kind of had to redo all of the actor work again. The feelings and nuances hit differently; and with a really personal piece of work, I had to go through some of the trauma again and I didn’t expect that. For example, when I came out I was living in Australia in the year 2000. It was a really difficult year for me. When I did the show first in Icelandic I already re-lived it and thought I had dealt with it, but for some reason, changing the language sometimes meant going through it all again, or even experiencing things in a different way than the first time.
At the end of Edinburgh we lost a lot of money (like a lot of people do), but we had really great reviews. After Edinburgh, I don’t want to say it broke us, but It got us to a place where we thought, ‘Ok it’s done now’.”
GayIceland: So what made you decide to bring the show back?
Bjarni: “Theatre typically takes a break in Iceland during the summer. All of the repertory theatre companies close their doors so there’s this grassroots group of theatre makers, actors and performance artists that just created a venue and are really fired up about making some new things happen. They are called Afturamoti. They had an open call for pieces and I thought that I would give it ago with this show because I haven’t done it in Icelandic for more than two years and it’s great to be part of keeping theatre going through the summer. So it’s fun to get back into it; but also, you know, we have to get back into that marketing machine (laughs).”
GayIceland: Do you think marketing a show is different in Iceland compared to other countries?
Bjarni: “Well we don’t have the same sized pool of potential audience members than other countries for sure. There are times in Iceland where you can have an amazing show, but depending on the theatre size, you could do it just a handful of times, and everyone has seen it. Bringing something back for a second season is always a bit of a risk because there’s a chance that everyone has in fact seen the show already but we do keep hearing from people who say they haven’t seen it and are excited it’s coming back in Icelandic.”
Bjarni isn’t just returning his hit show, he’s also part of an exciting new production that’s currently in the creation stage.
We’re seeing the story in real life unfold toward this duller end of the rainbow.
GayIceland: So tell us about this new play you’re working on.
Bjarni: “So it’s the same theatre company that produced Góðan daginn, faggi (Stertabenda). That was their third production and the one we are now working on the the fourth. The title of the show is ‘Skammarþríhyrningurinn’, which means ‘The Triangle of Shame’.
Basically it’s set in a distant future. The culture war is over gender autonomy, queer human rights, and women’s liberation are things of the past. The backlash has reached its final goal. In this imagined alternate reality, at the duller end of the rainbow, a group of experts hosts the grand opening of a museum dedicated to the dark era of political correctness (the one that we are currently living through). But their task is extremely difficult, as all the books have been burned, the records are gone, and human diversity outside of strict binaries has been banned and censored out of history.
We follow this group of people as they try to piece together a picture of the human rights paradise that once existed in Iceland and answer pressing questions like: What on earth was Pride? How did J.K. Rowling save the women’s bathroom from international rape organisations? What kind of tea did the so-called drag queens drink? Where did the indoctrination of children take place? Who was this “Hán” (the Icelandic inclusive pronoun)?”
GayIceland: It sounds very meta but also very poignant with what’s happening in the world right now. Is this how the idea came about?
Bjarni: “We received an arts grant a year and a half ago. The idea was very different although it was centred on a very queer theme. As we saw a new world start to unfold before us where trans people are stripped of their rights, words are banned and books are literally being burned, we changed the whole premise.
I really love that this idea looks at how we view history. We know so many things because we are told them, or because people wrote them down; but the people keeping track of history don’t always keep track of those who aren’t like them. What would happen if there were no books? No artifacts?
Queer people have always existed but they’ve sometimes been left out of the story because they weren’t accepted.”
Queer people have always existed – but they’ve been edited out of the story.”
GayIceland: Are you doing research for it?
Bjarni: “Yes we’ve been researching a lot and also digging up stories about Icelandic queer people. It’s fascinating to see how they were written about. They weren’t exactly part of mainstream society but people still had ways of leaving little crumbs that you can make some sense out of.
These tiny fractions of narratives that you wouldn’t think much about, but they’re there. It’s often between the lines
For example we found a story from around 1900 about a person who was referred to as a man. The story is that this person was a great worker on a farm who knitted a lot (which was a great skill to have) and the stories mention that this person would talk about having some kind of strangeness with their genitalia, but they were apparently very popular as a farm worker. Now with today’s information we could say, ‘was this person intersex?’”
GayIceland: Would you say that this show is in some way a response to the backlash the queer community has been facing in recent times?
Bjarni: “Definitely, and we’re seeing the story in real life unfolding towards this duller end of the rainbow.”
GayIceland: So could we say that this show might be like a theatre version of Black Mirror?
Bjarni: “Yes (Laughs). Of course there will be some bleakness, but we need to go there. We need to start to look at what these people want? These people, who are banning books and burning them. These people, who say it’s unnatural for a trans person to live their authentic life. What do they actually want? What is their end game? Do they want everything they’re uncomfortable with to just disappear? Where is the end?”
Queer people have always existed – but they’ve been edited out of the story.”
GayIceland: Why do you think it’s important that we have queer theatre made by queer people?
Bjarni: “Because we need to take the reins of our own stories. We need to show the world and each other our perspectives and tell our stories through our own experiences, psychology, world view and how we perceive the world. This goes back to what I was saying before. In the past, queer people weren’t really allowed to tell their stories so we’ve lost so much. We have to tell our stories ourselves so that they live on for future queer people.”
Skammarþríhyrningurinn is expected to premiere this October. If you would like to see Góðan Daginn Faggi during its summer run, tickets are on sale now here.
To keep in the know about all of the happenings of this great Icelandic theatre company, check out their website, and social media:
www.stertabenda.is
Instagram: @stertabenda
Facebook page: Stertabenda
To get more info on Bjarni
https://www.bjarnisnae.com/
IG: @bjarni.snaebjornsson
Bjarni also has a podcast. Some of the episodes are in English. The goal of the podcast is to make the world a better place by moving people closer to each other with stories from other humans; and most of Bjarni’s guests are queer: https://open.spotify.com/show/1gpZ96YgL69lH5ynzGAScf?si=59228e69182749cd