Fosse: Plays Six

FOREWORD BY BERIT GULLBERG. TRANSLATED BY MAY-BRIT AKERHOLT

Twenty years ago, Jon Fosse was known as a poet and essayist in some well-read circles; his future success as a dramatist was at its very beginning. Maybe one could call him the reluctant playwright at the start of this period. His plays were being produced in Norway, although with a certain caution, later to move across the borders to insightful and quality-hungry theatres, most of them small, with underground status.

Directors were fascinated by the musical, stringent minimalism and the profundity yet apparent simpleness of his stories.

The Swedish author and critic Leif Zern, who has followed Fosse’s career from the beginning, should, eventually, write The Luminous Darkness, an enlightening book about Fosse which highlights the mysticism of the author’s steadily growing body of work. As the years have passed, agents, directors, translators and other fiery spirits have transferred the flaming torch between theatres in various countries.

From having been a modestly recognised author, Jon Fosse now has a weighty and luminous name as a dramatist across continents. Only India and Africa are left. His more than forty plays are translated to all the European languages as well as to Farsi, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian. We know of at least 900 productions, and I believe that an unspecified number of performances take place without our knowledge and without payment of any copyright. At the beginning of the 2000s, a tsunami of Fosse plays premiered in Germany as well as France, where the wave is still rolling on. The great French director Claude Régy put Fosse on the world map with his outstanding and sensational production of Someone Is Going to Come in 1999 at Théâtre Nanterre in Paris. After that, a long line of Europe’s leading directors continued to stage a series of Jon Fosse’s plays. It was almost like a race. The first English production, The Child, took place at the Gate Theatre in London in 1998, directed by Ramin Gray. The performance was met with mild and courteous interest. A few productions followed, among them Nightsongs directed by Katie Mitchell in David Harrower’s translation at the Royal Court, but that was a less successful event. It proved difficult to mount another attempt with any great success. Several other translators tried their talents on Fosse’s texts, among them Geoffrey Mutton and Ann Henning, and in USA, Sara Cameron Sunde. But the truly great artistic break-through in UK would not happen until May 2011, when Fosse finally managed to bring English critics as well as audiences enthusiastically into his world. I am referring to the recently tragically deceased French director Patrice Chéreau’s illuminating, vibrant staging of I Am the Wind at the Young Vic in London, in Simon Stephens’ version. It muted all resistance in England. Simon Stephens and Patrice Chéreau travelled to Jon Fosse in Bergen before the rehearsals. Simon told me later: ‘It was a special night. One of the most beautiful nights in my working life. It felt like a special honour to spend the evening with these two towers of European theatre.’

Welcome to Fosse’s illuminating darkness!