A play by and starring Gemma Carbone

co-written with Giancarlo De Cataldo, Giulia Maria Falzea,  and Riccardo Festa

This play is a monologue, and this monologue is a mystery story. A Swedish mystery, to be precise, what with the snow, the days when the sun never rises, a violent death, a political conspiracy. In this play all the characters are tall and blond; some are very rich and important, others desperately alone. None of them is happy. GUL means ‘yellow’ in Swedish.

This story weds two elements seemingly unconnected, yet pertinent to each other. The first is the genre - and the mystery story happens to be called a ‘giallo’ (‘yellow’) in Italian. The second is one of the most traumatic events in contemporary European history: the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.

In 1986, the murder of Olof Palme had a profound impact on world politics, just as, roughly twenty years earlier on another continent, the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy had shattered the political equilibrium of his day. The political issues behind the murder of the Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister are extremely complicated and have never been totally explained. There are clues that would seem to link the CIA, no less, and Italy’s P2 and Licio Gelli to the plotting of the murder, yet there are also traces of the involvement of the South African secret services, Kurdish terrorists and Scandinavian neo-Nazis. None of them has an alibi; all of them have a motive. The murder of Olof Palme is a cold case par excellence. Blood and secrets in Sweden’s social democracy.