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Royal Court Theatre Downstairs: Previewed 21 February, Opened 27 February 2002, Closed 23 March 2002

Play by Jon Fosse, translated by Gregory Motton. Directed by Katie Mitchell with lighting by Paule Constable and sound by Gareth Fry.

They have a child and life changes. He can't go out and she can't stay in. He writes words which no one will publish and she takes a lover.

"I don't know what it is
that always makes something happen
But it must be something
Because something always happens
I don't want anything to happen
and then something
happens all the same."

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

Jon Fosse is a leading Norwegian writer. His work includes novels, poetry, essays and books for children, as well as award-winning plays - one of his most recent plays The Name won the Ibsen Prize. Fosse's work has been translated into a number of languages and are performed throughout Europe.

Performed in English

Extracts from the reviews:

"...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 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... I was slightly irked by Fosse's lack of social specificity. But 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 eavesdroppers rather than spectators..." The Guardian

"...[Jon Fosse] has contributed one of the glummest plays I've ever seen to the Royal Court's international season. “It's so sad, everything is so wrong,” says Sophie Okonedo's Young Woman and, lest we've missed her drift, she repeats herself: “it's so sad and miserable”, “everything's so sad”.... they are sad because they live boring, unfulfilling, seemingly unalterable lives... [Sophie Okonedo is] excellent and the rest of the cast almost equally so. Thanks to Katie Mitchell's production, we never doubt their reality. On the contrary, they are as real as mist, cloud or fog. But this fine young director, whose strength is filling grey locations and understated situations with dramatic tension, has come up against an immovable object: Nightsongs." The Times

"When you are assailed by as feeble a play as Jon Fosse's Nightsongs, neither fancy staging devices, nor experimental theatre techniques will conceal its shortcomings from the bored public gaze... The endlessly artificial and robotic quality of Motton's translation is reflected in performance. Characters, apart from Paul Higgins's powerful, expressionless, introverted Young Man, speak as if sucked dry of humanity... The preposterous Ibsenesque finale emphasises the irritating way in which Nightsongs evades rather than faces up to life." The London Evening Standard

"The first line of Nightsongs is to prove eerily prophetic. "I can't stand it any more. No I can't bear it." It is a feeling likely to be shared by anyone unlucky enough to sit through this wretchedly pretentious, interminably boring drama by the Norwegian dramatist Jon Fosse... Fosse's writing, translated by Gregory Motton, is colourless, repetitive, and devoid of humanising detail. Characters keep repeating themselves, and mostly talk in cliches... Tickets: don't even think about it." The Daily Telegraph