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by Jon Fosse, translated by Harry Lane and Adam Seelig, directed by Adam Seelig

One Little Goat Theatre Company, Walmer Centre Theatre, Toronto

March 13-29, 2009

Norwegian Jon Fosse, though hailed as “one of the world’s greatest living playwrights,” is seldom staged in North America.  Toronto saw his Nightsongs (1997) as part of WorldStage 2002.  Now One Little Goat Theatre Company is presenting the English Canadian premiere of his first play Someone is Going to Come (1996).  What has made Fosse so famous in Europe and what is so immediately apparent in Someone is Fosse’s uniquely minimalist theatrical language.  Clearly influenced by Samuel Beckett, Fosse takes the language people might use in an ordinary situation and boils it down to its very essence.  Like the music of a minimalist like Philip Glass, Fosse builds his play from the repetition of small significant phrases that grow with slight variations into larger structures.  Confronted with a script consisting of very short, unpunctuated lines, many directors would blanch.  Luckily, director and co-translator Adam Seelig understands this kind of text as his fine production of Thomas Bernhard’s Ritter, Dene, Voss showed in 2006.  

Two characters called only He (Dwight McFee) and She (Stacie Steadman) have bought an isolated house by the ocean deliberately to be “far from the others” in order to be “alone together.”  Their few moments of happiness are shattered when She suddenly has a premonition, “It’s so empty here that someone’s going to come.”  Indeed, someone does come, The Man (Michael Blake), whose grandmother died in the house the couple have bought.  The paranoia of She grows as extent of her isolation dawns on her, and so does the jealousy of He versus The Man.  Key phrases take on increasingly chilling overtones with every repetition.  “Alone together” starts to represent the plight of humanity in general--individuals using a set of phrases as a kind of mantra to explain the world to themselves without truly communicating with each other.  We may be together but each of us is alone.

None of this would work without Seelig’s keen insight or the superb acting of his cast.  Steadman and Blake are particularly expert in making Fosse’s repetitions sound absolutely natural as well as imbuing them with complex connotations.  When McFee laughs bitterly at the conclusion, seeing suddenly how this story will play out, so, with a shock, do we.  We must be grateful to have a company in Toronto like One Little Goat so willing and so able to take up the challenge Fosse presents in showing characters whose inarticulateness expresses all too well the void they sense both within and without.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-03-17.

Photo: Michael Blake and Stacie Steadman. ©Yuri Douc.