Review by Simon Jenner, May 8 2025
Mounting the near-unsayable, the shrouded, is a signature of Notting Hill’s Coronet. Britain’s most internationalist theatre is also its bravest. Though the 65-year-old Nobel-winning novelist and playwright Jon Fosse is almost a house familiar to the Coronet, his 2024 Einkvan (Everyman) pushes that to extremes: in 65 minutes of hallucinatory theatre. The first produced since Fosse won the prize in 2023, and directed by Kjersti Horn, it runs till May 17th.
Photo Credit: Tristram Kenton
If this is Everyman, it’s worse than we thought, beyond that gender-exclusive term. Fosse’s world is eerie perhaps rather than weird, to use Mark Fisher’s terms. But it’s the living who haunt each other. In Sven Heraldsson’s design, the entire stage is occluded by someone breathing in winter. Six actors and two camera crew are fogged behind plastic draped curtains that might be anything from a covid ward to an abattoir. Just occasionally a figure (a ‘son’) nears the other side, but remains spectral.
Against this remoteness, the actors’ faces are then presented individually in close-up, on two large screens mounted above the curtains. It’s an intimacy north-north-west. Three pairs: father, mother, adult estranged son react, often more with their doubles than in a lone pursuit and lonelier flight. Dysfunctional desire for love and a reactive solitude smacks more of adolescence than adulthood. Yet the ‘sons’ (Vetle Bergan, Preben Hodneland) are both long established painters. You sense they’re doubles, not doppelgangers, since death isn’t yet a prerequisite. Nevertheless Fosse teases us (can Fosse tease?) with alternatives. Are they getting it on again after a long break, siblings, or friends seeking a nostalgic beer?
Norwegian is almost the Coronet’s second language. With visitors like the Norwegian Ibsen Company (The Wild Duck their latest), even Swedish Strindberg mounted in the language, it means again there’s many Norwegians in the audience: who laugh before the surtitles catch up. Though this time it’s more painful chortles of recognition. Fosse has been described as Beckett without the laughs, and the Coronet’s equal championing of Beckett seems like stand-up by comparison. But even the Ibsen’s a scream (more Moliere than Münch last time).
Though we’re used to such backstage-filming techniques for short sequences (particularly a decade ago), mounting a complete production this way distances and stretches attention. 65 minutes is all you can take. It’s enough. We’ve seen a sliver of a world, like a crack of light in the arctic. Its beauty is a first glimpse of the terrible. It will have to do. An opaque, compelling gem from Det Norske Teatret and its director Horn; and the wonderful Coronet.
Dramaturg Anna Albrigsten
Preben Hodneland. Photo Credit: Tristram Kenton
