On the sofa, on the wall, a girl
Jon Fosse (who’s that?) won the 2023 Nobel prize for literature. We heard he’s Norwegian, a playwright, novelist, poet, that is either a multi-talented writer or someone inconsistent in his approach to work. I had trouble finding any of his work in English and my command of any Scandinavian language is limited to the Swedish I tried to learn 50 years ago. In one of the public libraries somewhere in the South West of England, was a copy of his 2001 play Jenta i sofaen, translated into English the next year as The Girl on the Sofa* and performed at the Edinburgh International Festival that year.
I asked for it to be sent to my local library. It wasn’t available. On loan. Two months later it arrived. I was one of a long list of people wanting to find out something about this Nobelist. I can’t renew it either. More people want to read it.
One act. Running time, I guess, half an hour? Reading it, I imposed an “intermission” to check emails, to break away from the feeling that he was writing about me, a feeling for which I could identify no obvious cause.
A family crisis, relived again and again, as the central character, the WOMAN, picks up her paint brush and looks at the large canvas showing a girl sitting on a sofa. In the room – her studio? – the GIRL sits on a sofa.
The WOMAN’s opening lines:
No
(Short pause.)
it’s so bad
(Short pause.)
I can’t paint
It’s poetry. No punctuation (except in the stage directions) straight through the single act. The sort of poems I tried to write a half a century ago, except better. Except it’s a play, not a poem. Maybe. Something like forty years collapse into half an hour, and people oceans apart into a single space. Continuity of character emerges through contiguity. Persistence, whatever the change. A thousand words tells more than the picture the WOMAN can’t paint ever could.
* Fosse, J. (2002). The Girl on the Sofa (D. Harrower, Trans.). London: Oberon Books, Bloomsbury.