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Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse is big news in… Norway. That’s a little unfair: he’s actually one of the most performed playwrights in Europe and was a contender for last year’s Nobel Prize for literature. And yet he barely gets a look-in on this fair isle. Why? Simon Usher’s production offers a possible answer: that we Brits have no idea how to stage his plays.
Fosse’s dialogue is sparse, repetitive and brimming with dark threat, but here his surreal ‘The Dead Dogs’ plays out like a horribly stilted family drama. Five characters – The Mother, The Friend, The Sister etc etc – encounter each other over the course of one day in a family home in a remote part of Norway. The Young Man’s dog is missing, and when his much-missed sister comes to visit, she finds her brother is changed. It’s when the news comes that the pooch is dead – not a spoiler, given the play’s title – that we begin to see just how attached he really was to his canine friend.
People in this play say ‘Yes’ a lot. It’s used simply to answer in the affirmative, to pre-empt a pause and, crucially, to show there’s something left unsaid. But in this production, which is woefully lacking in tension, the emphasis on these many yeses is all wrong, so that their sheer volume seems ridiculous. It’s not necessarily the fault of the actors: there is some nuance in Valerie Gogan’s turn as The Mother and there’s good focus from the rest of them. But more often than not they feel as though they’re parroting empty lines.
Libby Watson’s weirdly incongruous set and costume designs don’t help either. The modern clothes jar with the doll’s house front room that doesn’t feel like it would be an actual home to any of the characters.
This script isn’t a masterpiece, but there’s certainly something here worth talking about. It’s a pity then that this production does very little to explain what all the fuss is about.