Plays 5: Suzannah / Living Secretly / The Dead Dogs / A Red Butterfly's Wings / Warm / Telemakos / Sleep

by Jon Fosse

Published to coincide with the English-language premiere of I Am The Wind at the Young Vic (April 2011) Includes: Suzannah, Living Secretly, The Dead Dogs, Telemakos, Sleep and A Red Butterfly’s Wings.

Genres: Nobel Prize, Plays

368 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 2011

About the author

Jon Olav Fosse was born in Haugesund, Norway and currently lives in Bergen. He debuted in 1983 with the novel Raudt, svart (Red, black). His first play, Og aldri skal vi skiljast, was performed and published in 1994. Jon Fosse has written novels, short stories, poetry, children's books, essays and plays. His works have been translated into more than forty languages. He is widely considered as one of the world's greatest contemporary playwrights. Fosse was made a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite of France in 2007. Fosse also has been ranked number 83 on the list of the Top 100 living geniuses by The Daily Telegraph.

He was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable".

Since 2011, Fosse has been granted the Grotten, an honorary residence owned by the Norwegian state and located on the premises of the Royal Palace in the city centre of Oslo. The Grotten is given as a permanent residence to a person specifically bestowed this honour by the King of Norway for their contributions to Norwegian arts and culture.

Reviews

[Shaun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! Pure existentialism and absurdism. In their different ways, these plays are existential suspense stories, centered 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 coloring the characters’ relationships.

In the first play, “Susannah,” the whole life of Susannah 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,” my personal favorite, lives are shockingly disrupted by an event that changes the directions of their future. The characters in "Warm" 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 Greek classic from “The Odyssey” with a contemporary point of view. All of Fosse’s plays are heavily influenced by the metaphysics of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and the absurdism of Samuel Beckett. At times, the above plays reminded me of Beckett’s 1952 legendary play, “Waiting for Godot.”

Fosse’s dramatic voice is full of poetic intensity, yet wryly ironic, and with a sense of the comedy of the human condition. Jon Fosse is one of the most produced playwrights in Europe, and his plays have been translated into more than 50 languages. This particular edition, published by Oberon Books also publishes Fosse’s “Plays One” through “Plays Six” of which this particular book is part of that glorious series.

Fosse was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite of France in 2007 and received The International Ibsen Award in 2010 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided this week to read the last two collections (to date) of 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's plays, since the award will be given on December 10 to the new winner, Han Kang.

Fosse's plays fall into three, not necessarily mutually exclusive, categories: longer, more or less realistic plays (to the extent that Fosse's minimalist style can be realistic) about the problems of communication between people, especially husbands, wives, and adult children; plays which have people at different times in their lives on stage at the same time; and plays which are set in some sort of limbo, possibly an afterlife or some sort of time warp, and are very difficult to follow. When I first started reading his plays, I found them very original and clever, especially the ones that monkey with time; but after five collection I begin to regard them as repetitive, following the same formula in play after play, and often repeating the same or very similar lines both within and between plays — how many times can I read dialogue like "Where are we? Why are we here? Where have we come from? It seems like we have always been here. Yes, we have always been here" or "Yes, I have to go. Don't go. I must go" repeated over and over, without losing interest?

Plays Five contains seven pieces. Living Secretly (Leve hemmeleg, 2011) and A Red Butterfly's Wings (Ein raud sommarfugls vengjer, 2011) are very short, a few pages; the first is a monologue about having a private life and the second is a dialogue among three unnamed persons about politics, and I can't imagine either being performed except perhaps in an acting class. Of the five real plays, Suzannah (2004) belongs to the group of same person, three different times — the only interest is that the character is the wife of Henrik Ibsen; The Dead Dogs (Dei dode hundane, 2005) is about an uncommunicative son who lives with his mother, and as in a few other plays (even such details keep repeating) has given up playing the guitar and seeing his friends; Warm (Varmt, 2006) is a "limbo" play; Telemakos (2011) is a relatively short play which alludes to the frame story of the Odyssey in a contemporary setting; and Sleep (Svevn, 2006) is another couple through time story.

I would probably enjoy any of his plays individually, but only if I hadn't read any of the others.

[KathleenW · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sparse. Repetitive. Dark. Emotional. Suzanna, which was about ibsen, was very much like a takeoff on “waiting for godot”! (Beckett).
As were several of the plays. Repetitive, meditative, elucidating. Etc.
The one I liked best was “The dead dogs”- which nothing much happened but it was just, well, plausible. Much more “exciting” than the others to me.
I’m interested in trying out one of his novels.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. and I visited Norway in 2023 so he caught my attention. What I’ve read from Norwegian authors or watching Norweigan movies, -seems to be a little bit dark and depressing. it could be from their climate and the fact that they live through strange time periods where either it’s light all the time or dark all the time or you know very short summertime. A bit isolated up there? Which makes me want to go back and check it out-2025 I hope to return and go way further north up up up the coast. I plan to select one of his novels to read and see how it goes.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

En este tomo hay por fin una novedad dentro de lo que venían siendo las obras de teatro de Fosse. Abre el tomo "Suzannah" en el que se representa un monólogo que encarna la esposa del escritor y maestro de Fosse: Henrik Ibsen. Algo parecido sucede con una de las últimas piezas en la que se representa una recreación de una escena breve de la Odisea, todo esto escrito muy a la manera de Fosse. El resto de piezas sigue en la estela ya conocidísima del autor y no por eso dejan de ser intensas ni se las podría de calificar de repetitivas en el mal sentido de la palabra.