✭✭✭✭✩ / ✭✭✭✩✩

by Jon Fosse / Martin Crimp, directed by Katie Mitchell

Royal Court Theatre, du Maurier Theatre Centre, Toronto

April 3-7, 2002

"Time, Infants and Song"

A return visit from Britain's renowned Royal Court Theatre has inaugurated the World Stage Preview, a mini-festival of contemporary world theatre.  If, as Artistic Director Don Shipley pointed out, sufficient sponsorship can be found, The World Stage Preview will alternate with the full-fledged World Stage Festival making April the month when Toronto becomes a showcase for the best in national and international theatre.  The Royal Court has brought a double -bill with both plays new to North America.  "Nightsongs" (1997) by Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse (translated by Gregory Motton) is an agonizing but rewarding 90-minute play about a stagnating relationship.  British playwright Martin Crimp's "Face to the Wall" (2002) is an 18-minute squib about the trivialization of evil.  The acute precision of acting and direction bring out the horror both plays see in the banality of everyday life.

Though unknown on this side of the Atlantic, Jon Fosse's plays have been performed throughout Europe, some hailing him as the "Beckett of the 21st century".  It's hard to judge on the basis of one work, but "Nightsongs" seems very much as if Beckett had written a play by Ibsen.  Like Ibsen's famous four-act plays in prose, "Nightsongs" takes place in four sections over a restricted period of time, here from about eight in the evening to five in the morning.  Like "A Doll's House" or "Hedda Gabler", it looks at a domestic couple on the verge of a break-up that eventually ends in tragedy.  The ending of "Nightsongs" recalls those of both of those plays even as it reverses them. 

Ibsen, however, focussed on dynamic situations.  Fosse, like Beckett, presents us with a stasis.  We meet an unnamed, unsuccessful writer (Paul Higgins) and Valerie (Sophie Okonedo), the woman he lives with.  He has become completely enervated and despondent since the birth of their baby to the point that he does nothing but lie on a sofa and read, or pretend to read.  He can't bring himself to leave their apartment.  The "atmosphere" he creates, according to Valerie, drives people away.  None of Valerie's arguing or cajoling seems to have any effect on him.  A visit from the writer's parents (Gillian Hanna and Christopher Saul) to see the baby shows them to be nearly as uncommunicative as their son, whom they seem as embarrassed to acknowledge as the baby.

Each scene begins with an announcement of the time and the arrival or departure of Valerie.  The writer has to know precisely how long she will be gone and when she will return and if she late he upbraids her.  Valerie, for her part, does not want to be pulled into her boyfriend's Slough of Despond and goes out for most of the night.  As we discover she has been seeing another man Mike (Jonathan Cullen) and has called him to help her move in with him claiming the writer has "threatened" her. 

In a key speech, Valerie says, "I don't know what it is that always makes something happen.  But it must be something, because something always happens.  I don't want anything to happen and then something happens all the same".  The paradox Fosse explores is the human desire for stability and security while caught in the ceaseless flow of time and change.  Fosse views this desire for stability as a form of infantilism.  When  the baby pram is on stage with the writer the similarities are obvious--neither does anything, neither wants things to be different, both have separation anxiety, both fear rejection.  Ultimately, however, we see that all the characters are like this.  The most disheartening revelation comes near the end.  When Mike forces Valerie to decide whether she will or will not go with, she exhibits the same paralysis of will in relation to him as the writer did in relation to her.  For Fosse adults are merely infants who have grown older, helpless to stop the flow of time, helpless to cope with change when it happens.       

Fosse emphasizes stasis in the play with dialogue that itself seems unable to move forward.  Less expressive than Beckett's, Fosse's characters are almost completely unable to articulate thoughts or feelings.  Once they hit on a formula--"I can't stand this any more", "But we're good together"--they repeat it ad nauseam as if lacking the imagination to vary it, as if repetition were the only way to communicate.  As a stylistic device the endless iteration of the same conversations does try one's patience but from another point of view it shows the characters creating a static situation even as they discuss how to change it. 

"Face to the Wall" acts like a sorbet after this main course, though its lightness is deceptive.  We see a man (Peter Wight) pitching a script for a film to two others (Higgins and Okonedo).  The presence of a prompter (Hanna) who interrupts the man throughout with corrections signals that this is a rehearsal for a play.  The man's increasing dependence on the prompter infuriates him simultaneously with his character's awareness that his script has no potential.  The play ends with the man singing a bluesy song based on the plot of the failed script with Higgins and Okonedo as backup singers.  Crimp's layered structure tricks us into laughing at the subject of both script and song, a postman's murder of a schoolteacher in front of a class and subsequent one-by-one execution of the schoolchildren.  Crimp asks to what extent art, whether film, song or theatre, insulates us by its nature from the horrors it depicts.  At the same time the man's anger with the prompter demonstrates the motivation of built-up rage that demonstrates the motivation for violence that the man's lame script doesn't provide.   

The acting is impeccable all round.  In "Nightsongs" Higgins is like a man collapsed into himself, overcome with dread, while Okonedo shows us a woman who seems to sink further into quicksand of her relationship the more she struggles against it.  Hanna and Saul give finely etched comic portraits of the parents.  Cullen makes Mike seem freer from the infantilism of the others until it seems he may lose Valerie.  In "Face to the Wall" Wight's twofold duty as actor and singer is a delight.

Director Katie Mitchell has eschewed the postmodern style of the "Oresteia" seen at the World Stage in 2000.  She is now experimenting with bringing the aesthetic of the Danish Dogme movement in film to bear in the theatre.  Rehearsal continues throughout the performance period.  There is no set, all props are found objects and the actors decide what they will wear.  Light and sound are mixed live.  The result is the kind of minimalism and intensity one associates with Peter Brook.  In a piece like "Nightsongs", so dependent on pauses and silence, the ensemble's precision is breath-taking. 

These plays are about as far removed from light entertainment as can be imagined.  They are for people who go to the theatre seeking a challenge, who want to know what paths serious contemporary drama is taking.  How fortunate we are to have the World Stage to bring them to us.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Sophie Okonedo and Paul Higgins. ©2002 Tristram Kenton.