Jon Fosse A Claude Régy’s Uncreated Play
“Bastard painters” yells Lars Hertervig as he splits wood with an axe, imagining the skull of one of those painters who can’t paint.This is how Jon Fosse evokes, in Melancholy II, the Norwegian artist born in 1830, who produced a hallucinatory work of shores, mists and reefs, before lapsing into madness. Fosse was born on the island of Karmøy off the west coast of Norway in 1959. Working on a theatricality of silence, his work defines a Europe other than the one we imagine in France: a Europe of the Non-South, where literature isn’t the euphoric enterprise opened up by the Odyssey, but the axe that Kafka says serves to “split this frozen sea within us”.
The director Claude Régy was the ferryman for this work, from Someone is Going to Come (1996) to Death Variations (2001), via Melancholy (1995), not to mention the never- presented I Am the Wind; a production worked on in January-February, 2008, and abandoned mid-rehearsal...
Review a show that nobody has seen... Why not? Manuscripts destroyed, paintings in progress, films not made ... legend makes room for them. Why is it exceptional to hear that a director has left a creation unfinished? And this for no other reason than that the wind failed to blow? The criticism of such a production is does perhaps lack in potential... However ‘uncreated’ it may have been, has I Am the Wind not accomplished something all the same?
One of the two actors in this epic, Gérard Watkins, wrote a text for Régy’s funeral: “Nobody saw I Am the Wind because I Am the Wind didn’t take place. We threw in the towel. I’ve known for some years now that it’s the most beautiful show I’ve never performed in. Because I didn’t perform in it. Because Claude Régy’s radicalism goes that far: to the point of the impossible.”
The action in I Am the Wind is minimal. Two characters take a boat to an inlet and then out to sea. THE ONE (1) has committed an act, which is the subject of his dialogue with THE OTHER. During the trip they drink schnapps, make food for each other, and talk about what THE ONE feels: the impression he has of being transformed, becoming the wind... until he throws himself into the water.
AMNIOTIC EXPERIENCE
This text by Fosse was created and brought to life by that other great French director who has died in the last decade, Patrice Chéreau. This staging was in 2011, at the Young Vic Theatre in London. The show opened with the arrival of THE OTHER carrying THE ONE dripping with water.Thus, Chéreau and the choreographer who assisted him,Thierry Thieû Niang, had chosen to use a realistic element, playing with the injunctions of Jon Fosse, who warns at the opening of the play that everything is played out “in an imaginary and barely suggested boat”. Régy, for his part, aimed at this abstraction. Not a disembodiment, but a pre-embodiment, as Gaël Baron evokes. The second actor in the adventure experienced these rehearsals as the staging of an amniotic experience. Régy used these images to guide him through this ineffable intra-uterine dialogue preparing the life of a pair of twins.
For its author too, I Am the Wind was a boundary piece. In a text in Régy’s press kit we read these lines of Fosse’s: “I have the feeling, for example, that I Am the Wind resembles a poem that I would have written to myself, and which distances me from theatre in the strict sense. I also know that I have finished exploring the best theatrical situation there is: that of jealousy, of the love triangle. Unless I come back to change
the way I read it—but first I’ll have to change myself.” Fosse would return to the theatre in 2020, after writing a series of novels. These Eyes is a play that speaks again of the metamorphosis of beings into elements: “For we are the sea,” say the voices... Reading I Am the Wind, we witness a dialogue between two people who, thanks to a precise maritime language, we understand are manoeuvring a boat, but who, at the same time, are having a drink or cooking a meal as if they were in an apartment. I imagine two old friends who meet in THE ONE’s small kitchen, and embark on one of those terrible conversations. They set sail and lead us to the Isle of the Dead... THE OTHER would see THE ONE jump out of the window, or would catch his gaze, lost in the void. Faced with the abyss of the other, for whom nothing can be done...
But Fosse has an operative conception of language. If he uses the metaphor of the sea, it is because he knows that in the theatre, the words given to say produce reality. Thus the play is a concrete account of a journey at sea. The boat sails towards a definitive ending, which begins again each evening, in an ourobouros structure. It is a sacrificial ritual.
Régy was working at the same time on Pessoa’s Maritime Ode. Of the two plays, one was to be the counter-relief of the other... What happened to the sacrificed text? In hisbook Dans le Désordre, published by Actes Sud in 2011, Claude Régy writes: “It is perturbing: ever since I gave up on this text – gave up on representing it—it has continued to stir up living movements in me. It is a work that never ceases. And it is also mixed with my past and future work.” Going further back, in his second book, L’Ordre des Morts (1999), where Régy evokes his encounter with Fosse’s work, we discover a prelude to this abandoning: “We also feel that we can—and with just as much force— not want at all what we absolutely want.” Further on: “You have to know how to withdraw. It is in the absence.” And then: “The material of a show doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist anymore than the material of the writing.” It is as if everything had been conceived for a long time, but had taken ten years...
WATER-GREEN CURTAINS
In his account, the actor Gérard Watkins writes: “We’re rehearsing. Not much light. Some Quartz on the floor. A footbridge. I start again from the beginning, ‘Simplement tu l’as fait’ [‘You did it’].” When he welcomes me to his home, Gerard serves me a cup of coffee. We are in his living room. Half-light of water-green curtains. A beautiful fabric that absorbs the light and diffuses it. The glow of the ocean depths. Having already worked with Régy, on Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, he tells me how cold it was in the rehearsal room, and how Claude wasn’t satisfied with the set-up, as he liked to work in the decor and lighting. From where I am sitting, I can see Gérard’s face as I have never seen it before. What is repeating in him? He searches for words, to say to what extent he experienced the metaphors as reality. That memory of having been wet, of having gone under and of having emerged washed out.” The second actor Baron, for his part, told me on the phone: “If it’s not working, you can feel it, you can feel it’d be better to stop... And at the same time, there... nothing was happening... Gérard was ill, he’d caught a cold, but he was searching. I could see him struggling with the wave, but to the exact point the text was calling us to… I too had struggled at the beginning, a lot. I had the feeling of being in front of a mass of water, a wall, drowned…The text is very difficult to learn: made up of repetitions, variations... The very fact of learning it is an ordeal that resembles asphyxiation… When Claude announced he was suspending the work, it seemed to me I was in the process of getting my head above water. Accepting sinking, breathing from the bottom. I had the feeling I could say those words: ‘I am the wind.’” Gaël continues: “One evening... the last evening, the last rehearsal, just before leaving the Théâtre de l’Aquarium... I don’t think I dreamt it... Claude confided in me... he was thinking aloud, trying to understand why we couldn’t do it... It was fleeting, he didn’t come back to it, but he said: “We should’ve worked in total darkness, with just voices. Everything I see prevents me from hearing.” Fosse says so in the play: “THE ONE: I want silence / silence fleeting enough / and then I want / everything to be less visible / THE OTHER: Because everything’s visible / THE ONE: Everything’s visible / everything can be seen / everything they hide behind their words / everything they probably don’t even know themselves / all of this I see”.
THE NAVIGATOR
Régy has always tackled head-on the constraints inherent in the “two-character” play, which constitutes a real theatrical paradox. For every conflict needs a third party, even an absent one. In I Am the Wind, Fosse offers a very strange dramaturgical solution to this mirror problem. He speaks of a single poem, divided between two voices. The third party may be the sea, but the dialectic at work is no less vertiginous.
In Ancient Germanic Literatures, Jorge Luis Borges evokes a medieval text: the elegy The Navigator. It is a dialogue between a sailor and a young man. The latter is attracted by death and doesn’t want to hear the warnings, so subject is he to his “invisible attraction”. Borges writes: “Other critics maintain that there is only one character, conversing with himself.” Could this twovoice text, which isn’t a dialogue, have seemed to Régy to be a way of warding off the fatality of the duel? This is where the commentary comes to an end, where the search for hidden motives trips over itself. The reasons belong to the other, and escape him. Régy states in his book that I Am the Wind isn’t about suicide. “Throwing oneself into the sea here isn’t a suicide.”
Is stopping a show in the middle of rehearsing it like chopping a log with an axe, shouting: “Bastard painter”?
1 The OTHER andTHE ONE in capitals refer to the characters in the play.
Lancelot Hamelin moves between fiction, theatre and investigation. He is currently working on war and madness and is conducting a “reading” of Jon Fosse, in the company of the photographer Cynthia Charpentreau. He has notably been published in the magazines Parages and COCKPIT.