Jon Fosse: The Name
| The sister: | But Beate has come home |
| The father: | (looking at her) Beate |
| The sister: | (nods) |
| Today | |
| Suddenly | |
| The father: | Well well |
| Is she outside? | |
| The sister: | I don't know |
| (The father nods. The sister looks at the boy) | |
| That's Beate's boyfriend | |
| The father: | (Nods again, looks at the boy, then returns to his newspaper. Pause. The father stands up, stretches himself, walks around a bit. The boy continues reading) |
| Well well | |
| (looks at the sister) | |
| So Beate has come home | |
| It's a long time since she was here | |
| (Short pause) | |
| Perhaps we should have something to eat | |
| (Goes to the window, looks outside. Pause. Wanders around a bit, shakes his head in resignation) | |
| The sister: | Something happened to Mother today, it seems. |
| While she was shopping | |
| The father: | Did it? |
| The sister: | She's just gone up to bed |
| The father: | Has she |
| (Short pause) | |
| No, I'll see that I get something to eat | |
| (The father goes into the kitchen and shuts the door behind him) | |
| The sister: | (looks at the boy) |
| Do you know each other already? | |
| (The boy looks up from his book and shakes his head) | |
| No | |
| The boy: | (shakes his head again. Pause) |
| First time | |
| The sister: | Everything is completely crazy here |
| Totally impossible | |
| (Takes out a bag of sweets from a pocket) |
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| Jon Fosse's play Der Name will be performed at the Salzburg Festival 2000. In 1995 Fosse was awarded the Ibsen Prize for Der Name. (Photo: Bengt Wanselins) |
An evening in the living room of a detached house somewhere in Norway. Beate has come back with her boyfriend. She is expecting a baby. She and the boy are waiting for the family. The mother and father come home. They are tired. They lie down for awhile. Beate goes for a walk. The younger sister talks about the parents. The father eats alone in the kitchen. Her boyfriend sits on the sofa and reads. The evening passes. Not much is spoken. Beate wants to find a name for her child. She wants the boy to take an interest. They argue. Later Bjarne comes round, an old friend of Beate. The parents go to bed. Bjarne and Beate kiss each other. The boy comes and says goodbye. He leaves. Then Bjarne leaves too.
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| Thomas Ostermeier, director of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, is staging Jon Fosse's play in the Stadtkino. (Photo: Esther Dörring) |
Beate stands alone at the window and looks out onto the fjord. The continents of unfulfilled wishes of Fosse's figures only be guessed from the sparse nature and rhythm of the language in this description of a homecoming. In faltering sentences that are blurted out and broken off the condemnations that are revolving around in the souls rise to the surface, and in struggling for the most minor action - gesture, glance or handshake - and in the indecisiveness, the advancing forward followed by subsequent withdrawal and taking back of what has been said, find no real expression. The precise and honest view of the project of the loving family as the core of society reveals a strange tiredness and disillusionment of these people. In their sadness they laconically confront the emptiness evident in their day-to-day existence and thereby the tragic element of these conflicts of normal, everyday life practically verges on tragicomedy. This laconic writing by Fosse has something of an unexpected warmth about it, but nevertheless the utopia of the moment always conveys a true encounter and exchange between two people.
| The boy: | I have been thinking about the children who are not born yet |
| (Pause) | |
| The girl: | (Laughs briefly) |
| Have you. | |
| The boy: | Yes |
| The girl: | Yes |
| The boy: | I thought to myself that there is a place where the children are all together before |
| they are born | |
| Where the children are in their souls | |
| But nevertheless they speak to one another | |
| in their own way | |
| a kind of angel language | |
| (Looks at her, smiles) | |
| And they ask themselves how bad it will probably be | |
| Because they do not decide themselves | |
| It is decided elsewhere where they will go | |
| For one child after another it is decided | |
| I'll come to Norway says one child | |
| The girl: | What an imagination you have |
Jon Fosse was born in 1959 in the Norwegian coastal town of Haugesund and since the mid-seventies he has been living in Bergen. Since the beginning of the nineties he has worked as a freelance writer. In 1995 Fosse was awarded the Ibsen prize for Der Name. When Der Name is premiered at the Salzburg Festival in the production by Thomas Ostermeier, this will be the first time a play by Fosse is performed in German.
Thomas Ostermeier was born in 1968. He studied stage-directing from 1990 to 1996 at the Ernst Busch School in Berlin, and in 1996 Thomas Langhoff appointed him stage-director and artistic director of the "Baracke" at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. In a very short time this became a cult stage and in 1998 was voted "Theatre of the Year". In 1998 Ostermeier was invited to the Berlin Theatre Meeting with his productions of Messer in Hennen and Shoppen und Ficken. For Messer in Hennen he was awarded the "Friedrich-Luft Prize" of the Berliner Morgenpost. Since September 1999 Thomas Ostermeier, together with Sasha Waltz, has taken over as artistic director of the Schaubühne on the Lehniner Platz in Berlin.
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