Einkvan at The Coronet: Jon Fosse play is appropriately gruelling
Einkvan | Coronet Theatre | ★★★★☆
“You don’t read my books for the plots,” Jon Fosse once said. The same is true of his theatre: His play Einkvan (Everyman) at The Coronet explores familiar ideas: doubles, grief, atomisation, fishing and painting, existentialism. Einkvan is particularly interested in the excruciating feeling of isolation, one that’s experienced despite the presence of others, clawing at your insides.
A hospital ward-esque, translucent curtain renders the actors shadows for the entirety of the production. They are filmed live onto two large screens directly above the stage, on which intense facial shots judder, uncomfortably close-up at grotesque angles.
Performed in Norwegian with English surtitles, six characters – a father, mother, son, and their three doppelgängers – attempt to communicate but, despite occasional glimmers of hope, their words never reach beyond their doubles. The father and mother make increasingly desperate pleas to the son, who does not want to be found – he’s hiding in a bathtub with his own doppelgänger, who is also his lover. Their faces contort with pain, blinding in their proximity. We would normally look away but Fosse forces us not to.
“There has to be a reason,” the son says in a lengthy monologue at the beginning. A reason for living. Later he will ask: do we exist if we are alone?
Fosse, who won a Nobel prize in 2023, has a style that is perhaps better suited to the written word, where the rhythmic, repetitive lull of his language laps at the reader like waves. The script reflects Fosse’s characteristic lack of punctuation or capital letters (in Septology, there is not one full stop throughout the entire trilogy), with the three characters speaking in repetitive patterns, although it is somewhat less successful on stage. The intense emotional world his characters inhabit is all consuming but it’s hard to accumulate as much empathy in just one hour of theatre.
By the final third of the play, every time the mother or father asks where the son is, you want to shout at them to ‘LET IT GO!’ But of course, we often cannot let things go. Our inner monologues often are repetitive. We get stuck on the same points, unable to escape. You suspect the characters could do with some serious CBT.
The immediacy of the live film footage makes this a gruelling experience. When the mother says “I don’t know how much more of this I can take”, you’re right there with her. Einkvan is excruciating stuff – but then so is human suffering.