Under the glacier

At the foot of the Snæfell Glacier, a parish priest is neglecting his pastoral duties, so the rumour goes, which leads a young clergyman from Reykjavík to the Icelandic province on behalf of the church authorities. What awaits him there, however, is far more complicated: a priest who would rather repair camping cookers than preach, an immeasurably wealthy and influential big businessman and three shepherds who speak of the miracles of revival and seem to need little reality are only the beginning of a wondrous and enigmatic story about a society between popular belief and modernity.

Michael Obst, who brought the Linz Landestheater a real hit with his opera Solaris in 2016, has now taken on the novel Am Gletscher by Iceland's only Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness for his latest work and brings its dazzling, profoundly comic world to life on the stage of the Music Theatre.