Night Sings Its Songs

A Young Woman (Katherine Innes) needles A Young Man (Reece Vella) about how they never do anything, they never go out...  She means him.  He won’t even go to the store.  He just sits around.  Her friends won’t come inside the house because of him.  He tries to ignore her, reading his book.  He is a would-be writer, but publishers reject whatever he sends them. 

The Young Woman’s grievances are repeated and repeated, as is the Young Man’s refusal to engage.  She can prise nothing from him.  It’s a picture of a couple at the fag end of their relationship, voicing the same complaints, hoping for a different result, and avoiding the inevitable: that it’s over.  Or is it?  The next step – for her - is to leave, but can she?  They have a new baby – off stage and silent.  (In previous productions, the baby wails and is rolled about in its pram, but never picked up; this is not so here.)  The Young Woman is attractive, sensual, filled with restless energy and desire.  He is a bearded shlub, enervated by depression, a hermit who never removes his beanie.  Thus the claustrophobic set-up of Night Sings Its Songs.

Jon Fosse is ‘Norway’s pre-eminent contemporary playwright’ - according to the program notes – ‘the single most significant literary voice to come out of Norway since Ibsen.’  This seems to me something of an exaggeration, but it’s a respectable assessment.  Fosse ‘lays claim’, says director Rodrigo Calderón, ‘to being Europe’s most performed living dramatist.’  I’m not sure what this tells us about Norwegian theatre or European theatre in general, but Ibsen’s dramas, no matter how intimate or domestic, reverberate into the wider world; they are, so to speak, bigger than themselves. Can we say the same for Night Sings Its Songs?

The translator and first English language director, Ms Cameron Sunde, says the play is ‘a modern day tragedy about two people who love each other desperately, but in an attempt to find each again, push each other into a downward spiral of miscommunication.’  But this isn’t what we see on the La Mama stage.  To call it a ‘tragedy’’ rather diminishes the word.  And do the couple ‘love each other desperately’?  Perhaps they did once, but that’s not on show.  She might attempt to find him again; he – literally – won’t get off the couch.  She is at the end of her tether and he is so sunk in self-pity that her perfectly clear communication cannot penetrate. 

What we see here is not naturalism.  It is heightened reality.  Much of the text is in blank verse.  Lara Week’s set achieves the necessary trapped-in-stasis feel, using nothing more than Venetian blinds and a couch.  Shane Grant’s lighting beautifully directs audience attention with careful choices – including sudden bursts of red when each of the characters experiences what we might call ‘a nameless dread’.  

Mr Calderón’s direction is detailed and expressive: the body language of Katherine Innes as she coils and uncoils on the couch achieves a desperate pathos against the immovability of Mr Vella.  He, really, has a thankless role, but what he brings to it is impressive; he does not invite sympathy.  Later, when the Young Woman begs him to come to bed with her – a last ditch attempt – there is as much pain and yearning in her body as in her words. 

Young Man’s parents (Miles Paras as Mother, the experienced but quite miscast Dennis Manahan as Father) are awkward and tense when they make a belated and very brief visit to see their grandchild.  Father doesn’t  even want to do that.  Father and son share a sly fatalism.  It is as if all the parents want is to get away from the poisonous miasma into which their son’s relationship has become.  Luca Roma, as a near dawn arrival, brings a solid masculinity into the piece – but he nicely plays the way his male certainties are assaulted by the Young Woman’s paralysing ambivalence.

The text is psychologically acute, a convincing rendering of frustrated vitality, of retreat from failure and a couple bound by duty and dependence rather than love.  The Young Woman’s patience at an end, she does go out, ostensibly with her friend Marte.  She returns late.  Young Man is frantic – not for her safety but in fear she would not return – and then in panic, in terror of abandonment, when she will not say where she’s been…  Now he repeats: ‘Aren’t we good together?’  It is possible that the development of this situation from stasis into action and horror is the Young Woman’s ‘night song’, a haunting fantasy of what could or would happen if… If she escaped...

Night Sings Its Songs is poetic and truthful if not the masterpiece Mr Calderón admires so much.  Its stylised mode prevents engagement; we watch with appreciative fascination at the exhausting descent to disaster, but we remain objective observers.

Michael Brindley