Oberon Modern Playwrights
3 total works
Includes A Summer's Day, Dream of Autumn and Winter
These three seasonal plays are typical Fosse, imbuing apparently mundane situations with an almost hypnotic intensity. In A Summer's Day, an old widow remembers the day, many years before, when her husband went out to sea in a terrible storm.
In a series of continuous but chronologically distinct scenes, Dream of Autumn shows a man unexpectedly meeting an old friend: she will become his second wife, and cause him to fall out with his family.
In Winter a fascinating but mercurial woman tries to seduce a businessman, but once he has given up his family and career, he realises may have mistaken her intentions.
Jon Fosse has been called ‘the Beckett of the 21st century’ (Le Monde), and the Royal Court production of Nightsongs was dubbed ‘Waiting for Godot without the gags’. Just as Beckett’s plays — and those of all great playwrights — grew out of their time, and influenced the current styles of drama, and were part of what brought their times forward, so do Fosse’s plays now. Fosse: Plays Six marks the culmination of this Norwegian playwright’s body of work for the stage to be published in the English language.
The volume includes the plays Rambuku, Freedom, Over There, These Eyes, Girl in Yellow Raincoat, Christmas Tree Song and Sea.
Rambuku: Two people. One finds it difficult to speak. The other attempts to understand. But what is Rambuku? Or who is Rambuku?
Freedom: There is a sense of otherness in Fosse’s work that challenges our notions of a concept such as ‘freedom’. This play questions if freedom, as we often understand it, is perhaps a prison.
Over There: A woman follows a man to his death. But do they see the same images on the way to the top of the mountain?
These Eyes: A snapshot of the dreamlike state of life. The characters exist in an in-between space which becomes their reality.
Girl in Yellow Raincoat: An examination of our collective weakness, and the fragility of children. It asks questions about notions surrounding fear.
Christmas Tree Song: A man celebrates Christmas alone (and reflects in a somewhat ironic way) on his life as he attempts to put up a Christmas tree.
Sea: A group of people gathered in a kind of limbo, on a ship, disappearing into something unknown.
Includes the plays Suzannah, Living Secretly, The Dead Dogs, A Red Butterfly's Wings, Warm, Telemakos and Sleep
In their different ways, these plays are existential suspense stories, centred around a common concept of time. The past is recreated through present moments, the future hinted at through shared memories, yet experienced from different perspectives. Fosse’s drama explores life lived in unexpected ways, with a sense of otherness pervading the present and colouring the characters’ relationships.
The whole life of Suzannah Ibsen unfolds as she waits for her playwriting husband to come home. In Sleep, one day captures the lives of a young woman and a young man as they grow into middle-age and old age. Living Secretly asks questions about how to live with and open up to one’s actions through sequences of time. In The Dead Dogs, lives are shockingly disrupted by an event that changes the directions of their future. Warm’s characters move back and forth through time to capture past images and actions, in an effort to make sense of the present. Telemakos reinvents an old classic from a contemporary point of view. Fosse’s damatic voice is full of poetic intensity, yet wryly ironic, and with a sense of the comedy of the human condition.
Includes the plays Suzannah, Living Secretly, The Dead Dogs, Telemakos, Sleep and A Red Butterfly s Wings.