Plays 3: Mother and Child / Sleep My Baby Sleep / Afternoon / Beautiful / Death Variations

by Jon Fosse, May-Brit Akerholt (Translator)

Includes Mother and Child, Sleep My Baby Sleep, Afternoon, Beautiful and Death Variations

Mother and Child is the intense journey of two individuals trying to connect. Like strangers on a first date, mother and son stalk each other, confronted with a shared history they cannot ignore. In Sleep My Baby Sleep, three people are in a strange unnamed place; through visual and linguistic association they try to decipher their predicament. In Afternoon, characters come and go in a flat that is for sale; they will never understand each other; someone will always insist on one thing, while others will insist on something else. In Beautiful, the past disrupts the present when a man and his family go back to his childhood valley. Conflicts simmer when husband and wife punish each other by courting his best friend, while his daughter meets a local boy. Death Variations explores different aspects of the theme of death; death of love, death of relationship, death of happiness, and finally the death of a young person. As the characters in Fosse’s plays search for meaning or even just familiarity in their ruptured lives, their struggles find an echo in the rhythms and repetitions of their speech.

Genres: Plays, Nobel Prize

401 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

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

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection contains the next five plays by current Nobel winner Jon Fosse (I've previously read Plays One and Plays Two, and plan to read four, five and six before the end of the year. The style and concerns are much the same as in the earlier volumes.

Mother and Child (Mor og barn, [1997]) is a dialogue between a mother who has concentrated on a career and her alienated Catholic son, and is probably the most conservative thing I have read in several years.

Sleep My Baby Sleep (Sov du vesle barnet mitt, [2001]) is a very short play which is rather difficult to understand, with three unnamed persons in some sort of afterlife.

Afternoon (Ettermiddag, [2000])is a longer play about relationships and lack of communication.

Beautiful (Vakkert, [2001] is the longest play in the book and the only one divided into acts. It is about a couple who visit the husband's childhood home and mother, and meet an old childhood friend; there are hints of past secrets which are never fully explained, and there is also a developing relationship between the couple's daughter and a young man from the local community.

Death Variations (Dedsvariasjonar, [2002]) is another long and somewhat obscure play about a divorced couple and their daughter who has just died; it uses the technique of having the couple appear both as young and old on stage at the same time but not interacting; there is a character called "the Friend" who may represent Death.

All five were interesting.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

De este tomo me quedo con dos de las piezas: "Afternoon" y "Beautiful". Si bien es cierto que la primera incluida en el volumen, "Mother and child", presenta un tema nuevo que Fosse no había explorado en trabajos anteriores (de todo lo que he leído de él) como es el incesto, las dos que escogí me parecen superiores a pesar de que sean una repetición de lo que ya se le conoce al autor.

[Marina Marić · Rating 5 out of 5]

Majka koja je ostavila sina radi karijere.