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by Jon Fosse, translated by May-Brit Akerholt, directed by Peter Hinton-Davis

Here For Now Theatre Company, Here For Now Theatre, Stratford

August 21–30, 2026

Suzannah: “I remember everything but I remember nothing”

Here For Now Theatre has certain scored a major coup. It is presenting the Canadian premiere of Suzannah, a play from 2004, by Norwegian playwright, poet and novelist Jon Fosse, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. This is the world premiere of the play in English, translated by May-Brit Akerholt. The play subtitled “A Kind of Monologue for Three Actors”, focusses on the wife of famed playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), Suzannah Thoresen (1836–1914), at three stages in her life — young, middle-aged and old. The play may begin as a look at the relationship between Suzannah and Ibsen, but it soon becomes a powerful meditation on what impact anyone has after death.

Designer Christina Poddubiuk has created a beautiful set presenting an antique dining table set for three people in the midst of the acting space surrounded by the audience on three sides. Into this space comes the Old Suzannah, who is preoccupied with the question of when Ibsen will come home. It is her birthday and she is expecting both Ibsen and their son Sigurd to be there. Given the lovely black, Victorian-style gown she is wearing and the fact that she refers to the city she lives in as Christiania (the name for Oslo until 1925) help us place the action somewhere in near the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th.

We realize that the point of view of the Old Suzannah is off kilter when, after wondering where Ibsen is, she then addresses Ibsen, as if her were present, asking him to close the window since the cold is bad for her rheumatism. The ruminations note both that Ibsen is sleeping in his bedroom and that an empty suit of his clothes is lying on his bed. She notes that he always likes to look at the young ladies, chides a current maid of theirs and expresses anger at Else Sophie Birkedalen, a maid with whom Ibsen had had an illegitimate son when he was 18.

These thoughts run in circles with additional ideas occurring with each repetition. In her most lucid moment, the Old Suzannah realizes that Ibsen is not going to come because he is dead. She remembers men carrying him out of the bedroom. She remembers having to be carried down the stairs because of her rheumatism to attend his funeral. But the cycle starts again with her wondering when he will come home.

Suddenly, the Young Suzannah appears. She is only 19 and has determined that Ibsen will be her husband. She, too, is waiting for Ibsen to arrive and we hear her thoughts while she is waiting. Her main theme is that although she knows Ibsen likes pretty girls, she knows she is not pretty but thinks that Ibsen likes her anyway.

Shortly after the Young Suzannah’s appearance comes the appearance of the Middle-Aged Suzannah. She is wondering when Ibsen will come because the table is laid for the seventh birthday dinner for her and Ibsen’s son Sigurd. Her main recollections concern the extreme poverty she and Ibsen have to endure before he becomes famous.

With the mention of Ibsen’s fame, both the Old Suzannah and the Middle-Aged Suzannah reflect on Ibsen’s own contradictory views of his works. On some days he feels he has achieved something of importance. On others, he feels what he has written is worthless and utterly without meaning. Both of these Suzannahs realize that they have been the constant in Ibsen’s life. They know that their faith in Ibsen is what has encouraged him to create. They also know that writing is his first and strongest love.

Because all three Suzannahs speak in minimalist language about waiting, some people may take the superficial view that Suzannah is a female version of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). There is some similarity between the two in that both Fosse’s and Beckett’s characters seem to define themselves as waiting for someone else, but the differences are much stronger. In Beckett, it is not certain if Godot exists or will ever come. In Fosse, all three women know Ibsen is very much real. He has come before and they expect him to come again. The paradox the Old Suzannah realizes is that while the physical Ibsen may be gone and will not return, the non-physical Ibsen is still present and will be present as long as she exists. More than that, the Old Suzannah has ensured that no one will know the real relationship between them because she has burned all their letters. If we didn’t already know that Fosse had constructed a fiction based on the lives of two historical characters, this admission confirms it.

Because Fosse’s play concerns three women, who are different aspects of the same woman, mourning the death of their/her husband, many people will think that Fosse’s play is a Norwegian version of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women (1991), which presents us with the same situation. Yet, again, the differences with Albee are significant. In Act 1 of Albee the three women are presented as three different, unrelated women. Only in Act 2 after the oldest of the three has had a stroke, are the three viewed as three versions — young, middle-aged and old — of the same woman. Albee’s interest is in having the three argue about the nature of their dead husband. In Fosse, not only do the three not speak to each other but the details they mention do not contradict each other. Fosse has so written the Old Suzannah’s speeches that it could very well be that her words conjure up two earlier versions of herself who are also experiencing her present situation of waiting. The Old Suzannah says she has lost all coherence. The splitting into three selves could be a visual manner of displaying this lack of coherence. And, besides this, Fosse’s three women do not hate their dead husband whereas Albee’s three definitely do.

In contrast to both Beckett and Albee, Fosse’s main interest is what is left of people once they die and why physical death does not seem to erase their presence. This is the paradox that perplexes the Old Suzannah and helps explain why, though demented, she keeps imagining that Ibsen is present in the house going about his usual activities.

Fosse’s plays are often labelled “postdramatic” because they do not feature conflict or action, which have traditionally been viewed as essential for drama. Instead, his plays examine an idea or circumstance from multiple perspectives, some of which may be contradictory. Both the Old Suzannah and the Middle-Aged Suzannah say that what motivated Ibsen’s writing was “the gift of grief”. It is possible to look at the cyclical repetitions of Fosse’s language for the Old Suzannah as a portrayal of the impact on her of the death of Ibsen. She says, “I have lost all coherence”. The language seems to reflect that as well has her seeing herself split into two other stages in her life.

I have seen three other plays by Fosse — Nightsongs (1997) in 2002, Someone Is Going to Come (1996) and A Summer’s Day (1999) in 2009. Repetition and contradiction are common to all as if characters are repeatedly meditating on a subject in attempting to understand its meaning. This process also occurs in Beckett’s later plays, but where in Beckett there is no meaning to uncover, in Fosse there is meaning, even if the meaning is not at all what the characters were expecting.

As the Old Suzannah, Rosemary Dunsmore gives a truly magnificent performance. She gives the impression of a woman in mourning who is still not used to the idea that her home is empty and that her husband is dead, but who nevertheless knows he is dead. What perplexes her is that while she knows at some level that Ibsen is dead, she also knows that he is all around her and within her. Dunsmore makes the Old Suzannah’s realization of this contradiction extraordinarily poignant.

Fosse gives neither the Young Suzannah nor the Middle-Aged Suzannah much to say. Brianna Rodrigues delightfully brings out the youthful vigour of a woman whose life is all before her that she can imagine as exciting and carefree. Maev Beaty show that the Middle-Aged Suzannah has learned that life is harder than she ever expected but that she has a will to survive that is stronger than the negative circumstances she and Ibsen face.

With its cycles and repetitions, Fosse’s Suzannah is like a piece of music and director Peter Hinton-Davis seems to know this and has the three actors work together as a precise vocal ensemble. The primary flaw in his direction is that it is too forward-facing for a production on a three-quarter round stage. The actors make frequent spotlit appearances standing downstage centre and facing downstage left and right, which means that those in the house left and right portions of the auditorium will see little of the actors’ faces. Only once did all three turn their backs on us downstage centre.

For those new to Fosse, Suzannah would be a good place to start since it features historical characters and events. The repetitions and cyclical mode of thinking will seem to suit an old woman like the Old Suzannah. It can serve as an introduction into the style that Fosse employs in all his plays and novels. The optimistic aspect of Fosse in Suzannah and elsewhere is that constant rumination does not lead nowhere. Rather it can lead to a discovery too great for a human mind to comprehend completely.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Rosemary Dunsmore as the Old Suzannah; Maev Beaty as the Middle-Aged Suzannah, Rosemary Dunsmore as the Old Suzannah and Brianna Rodrigues as the Young Suzannah; Rosemary Dunsmore as the Old Suzannah, Brianna Rodrigues as the Young Suzannah and Maev Beaty as the Middle-Aged Suzannah; Rosemary Dunsmore as the Old Suzannah. © 2026 Ann Baggley.

For tickets visit: www.herefornowtheatre.com.