So Close And Yet So Far
Jon Fosse's Einkvan and the need to fund theatre in radical forms.
Out of a plane of refracted and diffused light – somehow both heavenly and clinical – a figure emerges. As it gets closer to us its form becomes clearer: a man, almost naked. He rests his face gently against the translucent screen through which the light is being refracted. Only his nose that rests against the screen is clearly visible, the rest of him blurs and distorts. He looks like a faded memory.
Above him, so detailed it’s unnatural in the opposite way, two video screens show faces close-up. It feels invasive. Their faces are blown up so large that the capillaries in the cheeks can be seen. No flash of emotion can hide from this kind of scrutiny. The faces belong to actors, further behind the translucent screen, both present in the space and also far away. Their words are amplified. They speak Norwegian. Subtitles appear.
“It’s nice to see you again.”
“How is everything?”
“Everything is the same.”
The figure retreats from the screen, his form becoming more and more abstract until it is swallowed by the light.
This is just one moment from the production of Jon Fosse’s Einkvan that has been running recently at the Coronet Theatre in London’s Notting Hill, directed by Kjersti Horn. The whole play takes place through this form. The performers stand in a room surrounded by a translucent screen. With them are two camera operators and a sound person. Above this space is a video screen, split in two, that shows close-ups of the two characters speaking. We feel the presence of the actors but also feel the that they exist somewhere beyond us. It reminds me aesthetically of Erwin Blumenfeld’s photographs taken through fluted glass in the way it uses its form to reduce a body to a kind of spectral presence.
Einkvan, meaning everyman, is a story about people who have left one another. The play starts with a series of people serendipitously meeting after losing contact. A father bumps into his estranged son; two old friends wonder how they lost contact; two men who seem to have spent time together teetering on the verge of being partners reconnect. The text is wonderfully sparse like much of Fosse’s writing. Like the close-up camera work, in the text there is no place for people to hide. The actors talk (and this is heightened by the subtitles) in a way that feels pure. It’s poetic and somehow more human, more frail, then most writing I’ve seen performed on stage.
‘I feel like we are alone together’, one of the men says to the other in the only moment two characters are in one camera shot. They lie together in the only piece of ‘set’, a bath. The water splashes onto the camera. We see them through the droplets as if the camera is crying. It’s beautifully intimate and tender. You feel as if you’re right there. The camera takes on a personality. It is a person inhabiting the same space and in the same moment of liveness. The camera is a voyeur. It somehow feeds on the intimacy; it amplifies it and intensifies it. Because of the diptych video format we feel even closer to them than the person they are talking to. Splitting the video image in two means we’re forced to decide who we look at as they talk – there’s all the intimacy of taking sides with someone, we have to choose to adopt their side of the conversation in a kind of voyeuristic allyship. The camera work has all the intense closeness of a Wolfgang Tillmans portrait. Like in a Tillmans, we see every pore and bead of sweat. The actors seem to have no where to hide. As Tillman’s says of his work, we must “look without fear”.
Just as we are unbelievably close to the performers, we are also far from them. No matter how close the film camera gets, no matter how detailed the videos are there’s still a sense of unreality. Those who watch theatre crave reality – half the joy is to see people, real people, in a real space, breathing the same air as you. This is why so much theatre that overuses video cameras falls flat, part of the joy of theatre is found in its unique ability to have you sharing a space with someone.
Here Kjersti Horn performers an incredible act of directorial balancing. We, or at least I, felt completely conscious that I was in the same space as the performers. Through the amplified sound you can occasionally here the ‘real’ speech. You feel a sense of presence, that they are inhabiting the same space as you even though what we actually engage with is mediated through a video camera. When one of the men comes close to the translucent sheet and we see his form become a recognizable body we feel the frisson of liveness.
Theatre has a much closer proximity between audience and performer than other mediums. With a form like this one (I’m sure lots of people have this criticism) you may feel that that sense of inhabiting the same space as the actors is lost. I do not think it is here. Is it blurred? Absolutely and massively but it still exists in a palpable way. The actors feel as far away from the audience as possible while still being with us. Part of the joy of Einkvan is seeing how close to this line Horn gets and her bravery in sticking to her form for the whole piece. A less confident director would use the cheap trick of breaking the form rather than holding their nerve. What she has created is a form where we feel simultaneously right next to the actors, invasively so, and also detached and far from them.
This is what a failed relationship is. We are simultaneously close to someone and detached from them. We know them better than anyone else and yet talk to them as if they are a stranger, if at all. The trauma of losing a connection with someone - familial, sexual or friendly - is having to see one’s closeness at a distance and one’s distance from an uncomfortable closeness. It’s a strange blurring of the lines between having had intimacy and being strangers again. ‘Can we ever return to being strangers?’ is one of the questions Fosse’s play asks.
Using cameras in live theatre allows for one thing to be seen from multiple angles simultaneously. As my former teacher, Katie Mitchell, does in her ‘live cinema’ pieces, one person can be broken into several perspectives in the way that cubist painting does. Einkvan uses this technique only once. For the majority of the play we see one actor per screen. The cameras never cut so we see a blur as we move from one actor to another but for most of the piece Horn sticks to the rule one actor per screen, normally in conversation with each other.
It’s an elegant way to show separation. In the world of the play people may be speaking to each other but they are completely disconnected. As the two men begin to get closer and closer the rules of this form is eroded until finally, we see two angles of the same image, the men in the bath, one resting their head on the other’s chest. It’s a moment of great tenderness and Horn uses the cubist possibilities of live cinema to fracture the image. Again, we are incredibly near to this scene but also split in two. It’s with this image that the piece ends. We look at four faces: two angles of the same two men. Below we see ghostly bodies morphed into light, somehow with us and far from us – here and there.
Einkvan is piece of theatre that uses a radical form. It’s experimental and abstract and challenging. I hope that I have given you enough, between enthusiasm and analysis, to go and see it. But I also understand that it may not be to everyone’s taste. And that’s fine. That’s a normal and healthy part of theatre culture.
What is also true is that works like this struggle to be made in, or find their way to, the UK. Here we seem to only tolerate less radical forms. Some of our most talented and conceptually ambitious directors have had to base their careers in Europe to be able to make their work. It is a shame to see talent flee the UK. If you like Einkvan or not, having radical theatre, that explores what the form can be – that breaks it and experiment with it – is where we are likely where we are to find really beautiful things.
The culture is different in Europe. I was just in Berlin to watch theatre as a part of the Treffen Festival. The forms there were more experimental, less obsessed with text and more willing to work in the bizarre, abstract and metatheatrical. These are good things to be. In a world that is increasingly making less sense – late stage capitalism; climate catastrophe; the rise of populism; the list is long and scary – it seems that it is theatre’s duty to try and confront these issues and to do it it needs to be prepared to twist forms away from shapes we are used to seeing. The possibility, of course, is that bad work gets funded. Or at least work that people don’t like; Einkvan received some scathing reviews from a bemused section of the British press. In a conversation with Nora Hertlein-Hull, the director of the Theatre Treffen festival, she joked that, ‘the risk is that it costs a million euros and people go ‘what is that?’’.
This risk is not taken in the UK. State art funding is much worse than in Europe and as a result is far more conservative about its tastes. As funding is so rare in British theatre when theatres do make work, they stick to the magic formular of a semi-naturalistic play that doesn’t play with form too much and has a ‘big-name’ actor to sell tickets. And that’s okay. I’ve seen lots of good work made like that but it can’t be all we do.
I had a drink with Jon Bleiklie Devik, one of the actors from Einkvan after I saw it. He explained that in Oslo they had three major state-funded theatres and that the state actively tried to fund experimental projects.
‘I’m not sure we could have made this in England’, he said. ‘Too many questions would be asked first’.
Einkvan raises a lot of questions. All works that play with form do. As Nora Hertlein-Hull says, work like this makes people ask ‘what is this?’. That’s a good thing - a beautiful thing. Devik is right, in England we ask all our questions first and then don’t fund the work. In other places they fund the work and ask questions afterwards. This seems a healthier theatre culture. One towards which we should strive. It takes institutional bravery and better public funding, but it is possible – after all they do it not so far from here.
Like in Einkvan, we’re so close and yet so far.