Life is a voyage. At an average speaking
speed, that sentence takes about 1.3 seconds to utter. This means that
Jon Fosse’s play is overlong by some 67 minutes and 58.7 seconds.
Nothing about the play, or Patrice Chereau’s production (his first ever
in English), is downright awful. It’s just that the whole enterprise is
massively redundant, a waste of the notable talents of all concerned:
Chereau, Fosse, adapter Simon Stephens, actors Tom Brooke and Jack
Laskey.
A pool of shallow water occupies most of the Young Vic’s
stage. Laskey carries the apparently unconscious Brooke around its edge
and tends solicitously to him.(Brooke’s character is called The One,
Laskey’s The Other… oh, well.) They talk of an unidentified act that
The One has committed, but matters veer into a discussion of his
general state of mind. This is frankly adolescent twaddle, as if The
One were a teenager who had just heard about depression and was
embracing the idea keenly, making remarks like “I can’t bear the noise
of everything” and describing grey as “nice and ugly”. (I write this as
a monopolar depressive myself.)
These two have apparently been
sailing together. Suddenly, a large square platform rises out of the
pool and they scramble on to it; now we are shown the principal
metaphor at work, at length and in detail. The two eat and drink
together, come in to shore and cast off again, then a storm rises and
we approach what passes for a climax. At various points we see company,
solitude, loss and depression (I have remarked before that those long
Norwegian winter evenings do little for Fosse’s joie de vivre). The
analogy is fully worked out; it’s simply not at all interesting or
original.
Chereau’s staging and Richard Peduzzi’s design add a
couple of unintentional aspects of metaphor. When the centrally pivoted
raft-platform first rose, I thought that it was canting freely at
various angles according to the actors’ positions and movements; alas,
it soon became apparent that the whole affair was controlled by an
external force, which is not, I think, part of Fosse’s intended
metaphysic. And when it sinks back into the water, streams of bubbles
rise at its corners for some minutes afterwards, like a particularly
severe attack of bathtime flatulence. I doubt that this is a deliberate
design feature either, but it certainly lends a further dimension of
meaning to the title.
Written for the Financial
Times.