When the Norwegian poet and playwright Jon Fosse (1959) won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, he was almost unknown on the Spanish scene. The staging, in 2002, of ‘Someone is going to come’ by the Aragonese company Teatro Arbolé; a dramatized reading of his play ‘I am the wind’ in 2014; and three years earlier, the staging of the same work that brought, in English, Patrice Chereau at the Teatre Lliure constituted the author’s only presence in our country.
Until now. The Spanish Theater presents in its Sala Margarita Xirgu until February 2, 2025 ‘strong wind‘ (Sterk vind), a work premiered at the Norwegian Theater in Oslo in 2021, and with which Fosse returned to playwriting after a decade of dedication to the novel. The production presented by the Madrid theater is directed by José María Esbecwhich has a cast made up of Felipe García Vélez, Zaida Alonso and Alberto Amarilla.
The work tells the story, located on the fourteenth floor of a building, of a man (as the author names him) who returns after a long trip; He arrives at the house where his wife (Fosse also does not give her a name) has moved into while he was away. There is a young man in this house with the woman, and the man thinks that the young man has to leave, but he and the woman kiss.
Jon Fosse captioned ‘High Wind’ as a “stage poem». Esbec says of it that “it is not a conventional work.” «Fosse has created an artifact poetic and cryptic -says the director- in which the world is built in the retina of the protagonist, in the blink of an eye, in a blink that is a hasty moment and that before becoming aware is already past. That is, the gaze as a window to the world. A world in which the eyes are the poets of our reality.
The work addresses time, love, jealousy, fear of heights and an attraction to death, almost like a bad dream. This expression is used by one of its protagonists, Felipe García Vélez, who describes the text as «complex and beautiful», and assures that this bad dream that the story becomes ends up leading to liberation. «This is a world full of fear and trauma – adds the actor –, and art can alleviate them with beauty. ‘Strong wind’ is more form than content, and we performers have to face it from a place of vulnerability. We wanted the assembly to be as objective as possible.
“It’s a existentialist theater -completes Zaida Alonso-. His characters appear blurred, there are no defined psychological traits in them, and in this work Fosse faces issues that society usually avoids, such as death, transience; “It speaks of the anodyne of existence.”
#Nobel #Prize #winner #Jon #Fosse #arrives #Spanish #scene #cryptic #poetic #text
