Plays Five by Jon Fosse

Includes the plays Suzannah, Living Secretly, The Dead Dogs, A Red Butterfly's Wings, Warm, Telemakos and Sleep

In their different ways, these plays are existential suspense stories, centred around a common concept of time. The past is recreated through present moments, the future hinted at through shared memories, yet experienced from different perspectives. Fosse’s drama explores life lived in unexpected ways, with a sense of otherness pervading the present and colouring the characters’ relationships.

The whole life of Suzannah Ibsen unfolds as she waits for her playwriting husband to come home. In Sleep, one day captures the lives of a young woman and a young man as they grow into middle-age and old age. Living Secretly asks questions about how to live with and open up to one’s actions through sequences of time. In The Dead Dogs, lives are shockingly disrupted by an event that changes the directions of their future. Warm’s characters move back and forth through time to capture past images and actions, in an effort to make sense of the present. Telemakos reinvents an old classic from a contemporary point of view. Fosse’s damatic voice is full of poetic intensity, yet wryly ironic, and with a sense of the comedy of the human condition.

Includes the plays Suzannah, Living Secretly, The Dead Dogs, Telemakos, Sleep and A Red Butterfly's Wings.

Translated by May-Brit Akerholt.