About Einkvan
Saturday 10th May 2025
Last night I had the rare pleasure of seeing a play by Jon Fosse, the Norwegian Nobel-Prize winner whose work is scarcely ever seen in this country. It is called Einkvan (Everyman), and part of the international programming at the enterprising Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill. Performed in Nynorsk by Det Norske Teatret, under the direction of its head Kjersti Horn, the event is a masterclass in European modernist sensibility. As such, the story is less important than the psychological mood of the piece, but this is the situation: a father, a mother and an adult son explore their relationships and their sense of the world through monologues, which might be sproken by three different individuals, but sometimes likewise seem to be the internal thoughts of one person. And this is everyman (or woman). Like Samuel Beckett, who surely has influenced not only Fosse, but also all contemporary modernists, the text is pared down to the essentials. Yet its simplicity is resonant. Basic family antagonism, the desire to be left alone, the need to remember past connections, the sense of repetition in both feelings and phrases, all we ever say and think. The son is an artist so Fosse makes room in this intense hour-long piece for brief reflections on the representation of reality, and the despondent sensation of having nothing left to say. Throughout there is a bleak sense of isolation, which is deeply felt and simply described, until one episode explodes into violence. Horn’s production, designed by Sven Haraldsson, casts six actors — Vetle Bergan, Jon Bleiklie Devik, Preben Hodneland, Marianne Krogh, Hilde Olausson and Per Schaanning — who play the three characters and their doubles, which gives the play the profound sense of interior monologues. With a staging that is split into a lower space where the actors are barely visible through some dense plastic sheeting and an upper part where close ups of their faces are projected on two screens, this is an example of the kind of theatre filmed in real time which has been pioneered by Katie Mitchell. The effect of watching these huge close ups is powerfully unsettling, but mesmerising, with emotional truth radiating off the beautifully paced, slightly hypnotic, lines of text. This poetic account of loss, ambiguity and an eerie essence of estrangement is both uncomfortably intimate and as coolly artistic as any installation. The result is very mysterious and very haunting.
© Aleks Sierz
- Einkvan is at the Coronet Theatre until 17 May.
