Plays 2: A Summer's Day / Dream of Autumn / Winter

by Jon Fosse

A new volume of plays from one of the leading Norwegian writers.

Genres: Nobel Prize, Plays, Theatre

295 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

[Mary Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jon Fosse is the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Literature. He is both an author of novels and plays. From what I’ve read, his plays are better than his novels. I decided to borrow a two part collection of plays from a friend. As far as the writing goes, I guess the quality of it is something I feel unqualified enough to judge. My star rating is based solely on how much I liked the writing and the stories, which, as you can see, was not much.

Plays Two contained the plays “A Summer’s Day,” “Dream of Autumn,”and “Winter.”

“A Summer’s Day” was about an elderly woman who was remembering the tragic day her husband died (possibly by suicide) years before. I liked how the past was played out onstage while her older self was an onlooker at times. There was a lot of repetition in the dialogue, which I decided was a stroke of genius because it felt as though the past that was being acted out wasn’t the literal past, but a fractured memory that had been lived and relived for decades. I liked that her disintegrating memory was trying to fill in gaps that she had forgotten over the ages.

This theory went out the window as I read on and discovered that all of the plays were written this way. The repetition just got annoying after that. Without that layer of dialogue working like I thought it was meant to, “A Summer’s Day” just felt trite.

“Dream of Autumn” was a confusing story about two different couples that seemed to be in the same time and place at once, but you gradually came to understand that they were, in fact, the same couple in different times. I loved that mind-bending factor, but there were pages that I had to skip over because they made me physically ill. Weird innuendos and a really bizarre scene between two hot-and-bothered hormonal messes. There probably was some hidden depth in there, but I skipped through that mess as quickly as possible. The end was pretty good though.

“Winter”After the sexual weirdness of the second play, I told myself if I didn’t like anything in the first several pages of play three, I wouldn’t feel guilty about putting Jon Fosse away. I only read three pages. I didn’t get to anything weird content-wise, but the dialogue was obnoxiously surreal. I could almost imagine the characters wearing black unitards, chanting and snapping around the stage. Some call it art; I call it pretentious. Surrealism just isn’t for me.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este es el último tomo que me faltaba por leer de los seis que conforman las obras de teatro de Jon Fosse editadas en inglés. Curiosamente este tomo no se encontraba de manera digital por ninguna parte y no fue hasta que conseguí una copia escaneada que pude leerlo al fin.
La temática que reúnen las obras de teatro aquí contenidas es el de las estaciones pero solo hay referencia a tres de ellas. La estación faltante es la primavera.
A summer's day es una prefiguración que ya había puesto en práctica anteriormente y que alcanzaría la cima de su desarrollo con la novela Aliss at the fire. Bien.
Dream of Autumn desarrolla una historia dentro de los parámetros de lo que se le conoce a Jon Fosse pero que no es solo repetición de una obra anterior. Ya aparece aquí el juego con el presente y el pasado haciendo que se mezclen sin confundirse mientras la acción va tomando lugar.
El volumen cierra con Winter, obra de teatro que representa una relación tormentosa sumida en la dinámica del sometimiento. Aquí se agrega el aspecto sexual en la relación de sus personajes, tema muy poco explorado (entendido como algo de tintes perversos) por ello interesante de encontrar en su obra en general.

[Ian Carpenter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read the first and last of these plays, the first aloud. No doubt these would be so much better live, but to read, A Summer's Day was comically repetitive. Clearly the repetition is an enormous part of the trap the deeply mourning, elderly lead is stuck in - something that might floor me in performance. I'm left with the feeling that I need to see these and not read any more of them.

[Julián · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este señor es fantástico, es increíble cómo genera suspenso a cada momento con una historia que uno sabe cómo terminará, es una novela corta, se disfruta mucho

[Jingyi Zhang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Watched A Summer's Day at the Wilma Theater.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three plays, A Summer's Day (Ein sommars dag, 1998), with two superimposed timelines, about a disappearance; Dream of Autumn (Draum om hausten, 1999), where a seemingly continuous action covers many years in the lives of a couple and the man's relatives; and Winter (Vinter, 2000) about a strange relationship.

[Maclean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a pleasure read, but the the author has a unique style. Winner of the 2023 Nobel prize, he is compared to the premier Norwegian playwriter, Ibsen.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

reminded me somewhat of Beckett's "Rock-a-bye"