Nightsongs – Cock Tavern, London

Writer: Jon Fosse,

Translator: Gregory Motton

Director: Hamish MacDougall

Reviewer: Honour Bayes

The Public Reviews Rating:

Irritating, repetitive, painful, maddening and mundane, Jon Fosse’s Night Songs is a desperately acute invocation of a break up. As with most break ups it is also an unpleasant and energy sapping experience that leaves one wondering ‘why bother at all?’ a question that could be asked of both ex-lover and playwright.

As we watch two people breaking down, with family and lover helplessly pulled into their black hole of misery, the atmosphere in The Cock Tavern is one of muted but emotionally charged awkwardness; it took me 30 seconds at one point to decide when to gulp so thick was the silence. Whilst it hits real cords of recognition within anyone who has been in a relationship at times it becomes interminable as our lovers struggle against the inevitable; their choices becoming a cage that is as tangible as their bodies.

Concurrently the performers seem trapped in the heightened realism of Gregory Motton’s translation which pulls a fairly formal structure around each of their utterances. Throughout the evening there is a palpable sense of being constricted for everyone in the theatre, character, performer and audience member, and it is hard to tell if this is meant or not.

But within these confines the performances are beautiful and detailed. As the entrapped young woman and man, Rosalind Steele and Peter James puncture their cages with piercing emotional integrity that goes some way to explaining the melodramatic conclusion.

Having teased out beautiful performances from his cast, director Hamish MacDougall lacks enough of a holistic vision to tie this strange piece together and it sometimes feels patchy. Individual items which bizarrely work (the Lucian Freud-esque baby painting hanging above our sad couple’s heads like a noose or the selfishly ‘cool’ jazz music) are confusing when put together.

This is a gentle and painful production that delicately presents the implosion of two people and their fragile relationship but in the end it really has to be asked why put this play on. A harrowing but possibly unnecessary night of theatre.