FringeReview UK 2025

Jon Fosse Einkvan

Det Norske Teatret and The Coronet Theatre

Genre: Drama, Experimental, International, Mainstream Theatre, Multimedia, New Writing, Short Plays, Surrealism, Theatre, Translation

Venue: The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Mounting the near-unsayable, the shrouded, is a signature of Notting Hill’s Coronet. Britain’s most internationalist theatre is also its bravest. Though the 65-year-old Nobel-winning novelist and playwright Jon Fosse is almost a house familiar to the Coronet, his 2024  Einkvan (Everyman) pushes that to extremes: in 65 minutes of hallucinatory theatre. The first produced since Fosse won the prize in 2023, and directed by Kjersti Horn, it runs till May 17^th.

If this is Everyman, it’s worse than we thought, beyond that gender-exclusive term. Fosse’s world is eerie perhaps rather than weird, to use Mark Fisher’s terms. But it’s the living who haunt each other. In Sven Heraldsson’s design, the entire stage is occluded by someone breathing in winter. Six actors and two camera crew are fogged behind plastic draped curtains that might be anything from a covid ward to an abattoir. Just occasionally a figure (a ‘son’) nears the other side, but remains spectral.

Against this remoteness, the actors’ faces are then presented individually in close-up, on two large screens mounted above the curtains. It’s an intimacy north-north-west. Three pairs: father, mother, adult estranged son react, often more with their doubles than in a lone pursuit and lonelier flight. Dysfunctional desire for love and a reactive solitude smacks more of adolescence than adulthood. Yet the ‘sons’ (Vetle Bergan, Preben Hodneland) are both long established painters. You sense they’re doubles, not doppelgangers, since death isn’t yet a prerequisite. Nevertheless Fosse teases us (can Fosse tease?) with alternatives. Are they getting it on again after a long break, siblings, or friends seeking a nostalgic beer?

Oscar Udbye’s lighting suggests warmth here is a sunset seen through a block of ice. But occasionally it warms further: particularly when close-ups of the two ‘son’ actors are bathed in a flesh light. Camera operators Mads Sjogard Pettersen (also video director) and Borgar Skelstad shoot close-ups of those caught escaping an expression; but not quite. Erik Hedin’s spare score radiates something almost recognised: chilly, even redemptive.

The two men slosh in baths, in amniotic angst. If to be born is also a moving-away, then these two have never made it. They at least affirm an edgy, circular relationship and occasionally huddle together in the same shot. We see every bath-pink tone, every pore, as they affirm a meeting some time. Finally they seem intimate in the one frame.

As the two mothers, Marianna Krogh and Hilde Olausson have more to do than the fathers. Probing, tentative, pleading, they seen vulnerable, scrubbed clear of artifice. That pleading can carry a charge of neutralising the son’s fragile identity. Whatever it is that alienates him, the parents and he don’t allude to any backstory. It’s existential. Jon Bleiklie Devik and Per Schaanning, arriving last, semaphore more meet-for-a-beer avuncularity. There’s a certain blank incomprehension: they become immobile, almost marmoreal.

If the sons’ doubling is explored, there’s no hint as to the parents’ double identities. One feels it’s by process rather than compulsion that they’ve been split too. Except of course, a single parent might exert an emotional agency to upset the sheer cancelling of personality that such doubling brings. As the narrative proceeds the language, repetitive, pared, non-signifying of anywhere but its no-land, begins to numb.

Norwegian is almost the Coronet’s second language. With visitors like the Norwegian Ibsen Company (The Wild Duck their latest), even Swedish Strindberg mounted in the language, it means again there’s many Norwegians in the audience: who laugh before the surtitles catch up. Though this time it’s more painful chortles of recognition. Fosse has been described as Beckett without the laughs, and the Coronet’s equal championing of Beckett seems like stand-up by comparison. But even the Ibsen’s a scream (more Moliere than Münch last time).

Though we’re used to such backstage-filming techniques for short sequences (particularly a decade ago), mounting a complete production this way distances and stretches attention. 65 minutes is all you can take. It’s enough. We’ve seen a sliver of a world, like a crack of light in the arctic. Its beauty is a first glimpse of the terrible. It will have to do. An opaque, compelling gem from Det Norske Teatret and its director Horn; and the wonderful Coronet.

Dramaturg Anna Albrigsten

Published May 9, 2025 by Simon Jenner