I Am the Wind

Patrice Chéreau is faithful to the authors he likes. After having directed Autumn Dream this autumn, he wanted to prolong his encounter with Jon Fosse by staging his latest play I Am the Wind. This faithfulness is coupled with a desire to renew the forms from one creation to another. What Patrice Chéreau wishes, however, "is that [his] shows do not bear too much resemblance to one another." This is why he decided to create this new play in English, with British actors who can propose a different way of listening to Jon Fosse's language, a language that, the author often points out, consists more in rhythm than in meaning. In the Norwegian playwright's texts, the words are few and far between: what is said is less important than what is not said. These essential words, that speak to us sparingly of life and death, are spoken by characters almost devoid of psychology. What is important to Jon Fosse is the relationship between the characters and not the characters themselves since "it is not our identity, but our relationships that lead our lives." In I Am the Wind, there are two nameless characters without a biography. The One and The Other, two beings on a boat in the middle of the sea, here magnificently depicted by  Richard Peduzzi's set design. They talk very little, stammer, are short of breath. They question each other, but always very briefly: "The more we talk, the more what we talk about disappears." They barely act, even if actions are suggested. They live in a present that we perceive is pervaded by the past, but also by the future. They create emotion by "doing violence to language"; they neither try to explain nor convince. As close as possible to this uncommon writing, which is woven from sustained silences and incantatory repetitions, Patrice Chéreau, here with the collaboration of Thierry Thieû Niang, draws the best out of the voices, but also the bodies, of his actors to express "the inexpressible poetry which is that of theatre itself." 

Novels and poetry, essays and children's books forged Jon Fosse's international reputation well before he took an interest in writing for the theatre, in 1994. A writer of form, preferring "writing a whole" rather than fragments strung together, the Norwegian favours silences, unspoken words and the musicality of speech. He tried above all to have what is behind the words heard, that invisible matter that determines the characters and actions, often minimal in his writings. From And Never We'll Be Parted, his first play, to I Am the Wind, the latest, Jon Fosse wrote about 30 plays. The French public discovered him in 1996 with Someone Is Going to Come, directed by Claude Régy.

JFP

director Patrice Chéreau
text Jon Fosse
english text Simon Stephens
artistic collaboration Thierry Thieû Niang
sets Richard Peduzzi
lighting Dominique Bruguière
sound Éric Neveux
costumes Caroline de Vivaise

with Tom Brooke, Jack Laskey

production Young Vic (Londres), Théâtre de la Ville-Paris
coproduction Festival d'Avignon, Wiener Festwochen (Vienne), Les Nuits de Fourvière (Lyon), Festival GREC de Barcelone