Abstrakt: | The theatricality of plays by Jon Fosse, a Norwegian playwright who delighted the European
theatre at the turn of the 21st century, is accomplished in his using and suspending the traditional
dramatic and theatrical conventions, styles, genres by maintaining fluid balance between
them. While the family drama with its linearity of events is kept in abeyance, there comes the
absurdity of unceasingly reiterated events, and the oneiric character of Fosse’s space-time seems
to be opening a trap of the absurd world. Behind the plays’ space-time of patterns interwoven
with one another, and the smooth chronology, a delicate psychological background is being spun
revealed. Although Fosse’s plays hide echoes of Ibsen, A Dream Play by Strindberg, or Beckett’s
absurd, these are not easy to find with one single…, be it realistic, absurd, oneiric or a classic one.
Suspended between lyric and epic, words and silence, inertia and activity, the real stage and its
image, brightness and darkness, the past and the future, there arises a taut indeterminancy, concealness
and deceptiveness of Fosee’s world being at the same time one of the crucial experiences
connected with reading and staging his plays. To encounter the unspoken is the Norwich author’s
core human experience that consistently set in his plays. In doing so, Fosse seems to be exploring
the space of the sanctum — the human created in the image of God. Human sanctity is said
to be rising from his everyday experience, from the fundamental existential experience, random
encounters and partings, solitude, lack of understanding, hope, love, betrayal, hunger, illness, birth
and death. |