Jon Fosse was once one of the most performed playwrights in Europe. His pieces are sad, hopeless, but not tearful. About an encounter in Bergen in 2014.
Unforgettable when Jon Fosse first appeared in German-speaking theater. That was in 2000, when Thomas Ostermeier staged the play “The Name” at the Salzburg Festival. Anything but a stage mover: a girl returns to her parents’ house pregnant. The child’s stubborn father is not yet a grown man himself. The parents don’t like him. You sit around, stare out the window, look for a name for the baby and have nothing to say to each other. There wasn’t really anything more. On the surface it’s a sparsely depressing piece. Dreary, foggy autumn drama from the fjord. And yet it immediately stimulated the soul and the senses: the Fosse sound. This gentle composition of words, silence and time, in which the painfully banal combines with the most dreamlike, longing. This laconic circling of what is unsaid until it opens into deeper layers of being. This sad talking past one another, repeating oneself and remaining silent, carried by a melody that seems to come from the darkest, foggy spheres of the subconscious. Bonjour sadness.