A man drowns himself. The Norwegian playwright, Jon Fosse, is immensely popular on the continent; but he is barely known in the UK. There will be those who will find his 70-minute existential play, a bleak, poetic, Beckett-like piece, hard work and pretentious. Patrice Cherau, the distinguished French director, who is probably best known to British filmgoers for La Reine Margot, a superb 16th century romantic melodrama, describes it as a journey into the heart of two entangled lives, an odyssey.
Cherau’s extraordinary production is a joint production between Theatre de Ville in Paris and the Young Vic. The stage is filled with water. A raft (operated by a hydraulic lift) rises and falls, floats and twists. There are just two characters. They have no names and in the text they are just called The One and The Other. They could be friends, strangers, lovers; they could be alter egos. They drift further and further out to sea. Tom Brooke is the gaunt, emaciated, hollow-eyed One, clinically depressed, staring into space. “I want to say something to you,” he says, “but I don’t know what to say.” Jack Laskey is the tender, loving Other, who wants to save him but doesn’t know what to do and is fearful for his own life. The staging, the acting, the setting, the music and the lighting produce an effect, which is beautiful, hypnotic and haunting, and vastly superior to Fosse’s actual text with its endless short pauses.