Nightsongs ( Archived )

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Pictured (L to R): Sophie Okonedo; Jonathan Cullen, Sophie Okonedo.

Photography by Ivan Kyncl.

Lighting: Paule Constable, Sound: Gareth Fry.

Cast: Jonathan Cullen, Gillian Hanna, Paul Higgins, Sophie Okonedo, Christopher Saul

‘Substance matters more than style. And the important thing about Jon Fosse’s Nightsongs isthe play’s disquieting truth: the Norwegian Fosse emerges, in Gregory Motton’s translation, as blood brother to the early Edward Bond or the German Franz Xaver Kroetz whose plays enjoyed a huge huge in the 70s.

‘Fosse’s theme is the tragic banality of daily life. To that end he presents us with a young couple clearly at breaking-point. The man is a struggling, agoraphobic writer: he is supported by his partner, currently on maternity leave and craving normal human contact. Neither of them receives much warmth or comfort from his parents, who come to see the baby and leave with indecent haste. But the real crisis erupts when the woman goes out of the evening, returns suspiciously late and, after a series of lies and evasions, reveals that she is about to leave for good with her lover.

‘The story, however, is not really the point. What makes the play compelling is the deadly accuracy with which Fosse captures his characters’ verbal and emotional inarticulacy. Sentences trail off in mid-air. The grandparents don’t know what to say about the baby. And the heroine, at the point of departure, is helplessly torn between, conflicting impulses.

‘the play has the smell of life. Played on a sparsely-furnished traverse-stage, Katie Mitchell’s production also forces us into a strange complicity so that we become more intimate eavesdroppers than spectators.

‘And, with nowhere to hide the actors have no choice but to be totally truthful. Sophie Okenedo precisely captures the young woman’s sense of dither at coming to the cross-roads offering two equally snake-infested routes.

‘Paul Higgins as the young man marvellously hides his fear of abandonment under nervous smiles and tic-like tugs at this clothes. And Jonathan Cullen as the lover catches the embarrassment of absconding in the early hours, with partner and baby, crying: ‘There must be a better way of doing this.’

The Guardian

‘Mitchell has reconfigured the Royal Court Downstairs so that one half of the audience is lifted above the usual stalls space, while the other half faces them, seated on what is normally the stage: for a minute as the curtain goes up, you’re not sure whether you’re looking into a mirror. She has created a backstage area that is continuous with the onstage action, so that the actors can continue the play even when out of sight: an imaginary baby can be taken from his onstage pram to be placed in a backstage cot. Lighting and sound are mixed live, varying from evening to evening, in response to what’s happening on stage. The play is considered to be in rehearsal right up to the last performance.’

The Observer

‘It’s tepid, it’s slow-moving, it’s repetitive, and yet Jon Fosse’s play Nightsongs is painfully absorbing. No, it is not for all souls. What you get from it must depend on how acutely you recognise the truths it depicts.

‘Jon Fosse is Norwegian, and Nightsongs is one of several plays by him that have been performed in numerous European theatres. Its talk is just plain talk, but it has a striking rhythm to it: a natural but eloquent rhythm that derives, via Gregory Motton’s translation, from the short phrases of the free verse in which Fosse writes. At the Royal Court, the rhythm is beautifully rendered in Katie Mitchell’s production; I think this is her finest work since the 1998 Young Vic Uncle Vanya.

‘In large part, Nightsongs is a study in depression. The young man can’t bear to go out. He receives rejection slips for the book he has written; he hates it when his wife goes out, or when most other people visit. His young wife can’t bear to stay in. She chafes against the confinement he places on her, she is bored by his boring parents, she is impatient with his failure, she makes endless reasons to go out, she has another life outside about which she feels she needs to tell him lies, she keeps provoking him into new anxiety and insecurity. And yet she finds security in the intimacy she has with him, in his very dependence on her. The play is by no means plotless; and the crisis that she initiates destroys her a well as him.

‘it becomes more and more clear that Okonedo is one of Britain’s finest actresses. She doesn’t draw you into her inner being as Higgins, so finely does; she keeps taking you by surprise. Effortlessly she shows you each tiniest change of feeling in her conflicted nature. At the end, traumatised, she suggests that she has become him and the meanings that this leaves you with reillumine the whole play and stay in your head like an ache.’

Financial Times