Staging Henrik Ibsen’s and Jon Fosse’s Mental Landscapes

Norway’s best-known contemporary playwright Jon Fosse has often been compared to Henrik Ibsen, no less because of the two dramatists’ common emphasis on their native physical landscape as a mirror of the protagonists’ emotional and existential conflict. In Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (1888) and in Fosse’s Someone is Going to Come (1996) in particular, characters and actions – although generated within specific geographical and cultural co-ordinates – rise to the level of archetypes and acquire timeless significance.This comparative study traces a continuum from the modernist Ibsen to Fosse’s humanistic postmodernism in so far as the authors’ treatment of psychology, structure, and landscape exposes ideas and endorses themes and images, which in turn account for similar patterns of staging. In a context whereby myth and allegory are projected against a background defined by the ocean and unfamiliar horizons, the markedly schematic representation of existential dread in both plays reveals strong visual conceits that are uncannily similar to the effect that one cannot really read or direct Fosse without making a mental note of Ibsen’s drama. The “haunted” nature of the spectator’s experience notwithstanding, both texts seem to be a director’s ideal material, hosting the natural environment so intensely so that it becomes an extension of the characters, punctuating the important stations in their lives and adding emotional and sensory texture to their words and their actions. From the point-of-view of a theatre director, decoding the plays’ imagistic identity becomes primarily an immersive experience in the Nordic landscape – of both nature and the mind.