Nature and nurture collide in bleak domestic drama
MOTHER AND CHILD
Bestseller Cafe, Dublin
Comparisons are frequently made between Nobel laureate Jon Fosse and his fellow Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Gloomy moral detachment certainly does seem to mark the work of both.
But where Ibsen’s gloom is never quite without sympathy for his lost characters, Fosse, if one takes his Mother and Child as an example, is prepared to damn what we call society as a thin-skinned construct, a selfbuild of self-protection that crumbles under analysis.
Mother and Child dates from 1997, and society has undoubtedly moved on from attitudes of that time. But Fosse’s outlook and philosophy remain rooted in an isolationism chosen deliberately, to allow him to pass judgment on the “madding crowd” around him.
Weirdly, his life since has led him to convert to Catholicism; with three marriages, several children, and possessing several residences in his native country, including a grace and favour honorary government mansion in royal gratitude for his cultural achievements. And he lives apart from his current wife most of the time. No transcendental Henry David Thoreau he.
Mother and Child seems to champion the concept that motherhood itself is entirely a social construct, not at all dependent on the blood bond of the umbilical cord. Our own society is increasingly obsessed with the bond being indissoluble, innate. Fosse’s thesis suggests mother and child have shared blood, but that’s all. She has not reared her child; he has not sought out his mother, until now. No longing, no curiosity.
The narrative presents us with a mild social exchange on both sides. The mother, a moderately successful civil servant from a rural background, lives in chic elegance in Oslo when her son comes calling. He’s not even at the usual age of curiosity about parentage: he has studied abroad, first in Germany (philosophy), then in the west of Ireland (literature). So he’s no teenager.
They chat in a desultory fashion. Or rather the mother chats, seeming to look for affirmation of her success in life despite her own lack of a university education. The son is lively, but monosyllabic, avoiding the airy social questions, and her repeated laughing regrets for not being in touch. But then she excuses herself; he was always travelling.
Trapped, it would seem, by pregnancy (“I was very young”) she handed her son over to her own mother, despite despising everything the older woman stood for, and let the boy be reared in joyless, guilt-ridden Calvinism.
She remembers her mother’s funeral, where she last saw the boy’s father, the only time since they broke up. And the boy has lived with his father ever since, and with a stepmother and three half-siblings.
His mother dismisses this extended family, again airily, but with a slight grimace at this glimpse of domestic warmth. The other woman is merely “Her”. Somehow, there is little respect for, or indeed envy of, familial contentment.
And so it goes, with the dual and separate histories unravelling in fractured images, the mother’s probings and revelations ever more narcissistic, the son’s ever closer to a demand to know how nearly he came to his non-existence. His unspoken question is more than was he “wanted”: was there an attempt to reject him before as well as after birth? He will cope, whatever the answer.
That’s Fosse’s answer: we cope as individuals not as parts of a unit. It’s as bleak as it is powerful, couched in its slick, constricted dialogue, and for all the characters’ railing at each other, it’s ultimately without the surcease of either accusation or conversely, forgiveness.
The play is given a cruelly sharp production by Glass Mask at the Bestseller Cafe. It’s directed by Johan Bark, who also designs and lights it, and manages to include a thrust stage despite the space limitations.
He is Swedish, and that national influence bursts from the production, although visually the influence is rather like an op-art installation from the 1960s. And this fits perfectly well with a 1990s play that’s of any time, in its displacement of the existential concerns of its own, or any given period.
Carmel Stephens and Kyle Hixon play the mother and son, the latter displaying an impressive athleticism for the director’s imaginative requirements of almost apelike posturing. And both actors are equally impressive in their handling of emotion within a dispassionate hypothesis.