The theatre boat MS Innvik was for ten years moored in the harbour in Bjørvika adjacent to what became Oslo’s new opera house and the largest urban development in Norway ever, including the new Deichman main public library and the Munch Museum, the Bar Code financial district and thousands of housing and business units developed in the former industrial harbour of Oslo.
The Nordic Black Theatre and related activities succeeded in finding new venues, but central Oslo lost a cultural opportunity.
Existence in the center of urban development became too rough to comply with for the MS Innvik- strict enforcement of fire regulations proved to be the end of her in 2010. The first important part of Innvik to be closed, was the popular, reasonably priced bed & breakfast. Along with the economic asset, went the breakfasts in the mornings, attended by people from Oslo and all over the world enjoying the best view of the opera building and the seascape around it. The fatal attack of the inner soul of MS Innvik, however, was the closing of the theater for several weeks. When the theater was allowed to open again, the restrictions were so severe as to reduce the audiences to one-third of what was the former norm.
When MS Innvik was finally towed out of the harbour, we a lost a valuable platform, a of open cultural development in Oslo. We followed and documented the last ten months of M/S Innvik’s existence in Bjørvika, without knowing the end of the story, as shown in the three epsiodes of A Ship With a View.