麻豆约拍

Jon Fosse is one of the world’s most performed playwrights, laden with international awards. But his work is little known and rarely performed in this country.

Writing in Nynorsk, a spare form of Norwegian with a relatively small number of words, his characters live in abstract, poetic worlds characterised by cold, harsh internal and external reality. Like the Icelandic sagas the characters speak little, and description of external surroundings is spare. Characters begin sentences and don’t finish, dialogue ebbs and flows like inconclusive waves as fears of revealing inner feelings make characters hold back. It's not like the kind of narrative theatre that is popular in this country, and passions are laid bare by what is not said as much as what is said. It is poetry and abstract music rather than prose that gets the plot done.

Finding a way of presenting his work to English speaking audiences is difficult. The normal tropes that make for popular theatre in this country don’t exist. Perhaps it is ideal for the medium of radio, where the poetry evoked by situation and words can be foregrounded.

A couple of years ago Radio 3 produced The Name, a bleak account of unspoken family and romantic tension between a girl, Bjarte, and a young man who is father to her child known only as The Boy. A bleak, claustrophobic setting moments with moments of dashed joy as characters failed to connect.

Now, in lockdown, we are presenting a new production of I Am The Wind with Lee Ingleby as The One and Shaun Dooley as The Other in a translation by Simon Stephens, who also introduces the play. Last seen in London in a production by Patrice Chéreau at the Young Vic in 2011 and described as ‘the greatest theatre I have ever witnessed’ by The Independent, the play involves two men on a boat, one an experienced sailor, another clearly afraid of the sea. But that’s just a metaphor. And yet it is real. The setting gives it an ability to convey in abstract terms a human fear of death and also of what it means to live, in a world harsh and unforgiving but with moments of piercing beauty. The play was recorded, with a beautiful soundscape, just before lockdown. But in a sparse, poetic way it speaks volumes about our current situation and what it is to be alive, as all great art should.

I’m glad that Radio 3 could do it, bringing theatre that would be hard to see in the best of times to a large audience in times when to consider our humanity is more important than ever. That’s what radio drama at its best can do. That’s why it matters that we put on serious drama in times like this. That’s why this time of all times is time to know the work of Jon Fosse. Hear it on 麻豆约拍 radio 3 and 麻豆约拍 Sounds.