PIT, Grenland Friteater | Returned son, unacceptable parents

Fredrik Brattberg is one of the playwrights most played abroad, despite the fact that he has written almost 20 plays (three volumes published by Transit Forlag), and that these have been translated into more than 20 languages, most often played in France and the Czech Republic , and regularly in Denmark, Iceland, England, Indonesia, China and in New York.

The most played of Brattberg’s pieces is «Tilbakekomstene», the debut from 2011, for which Brattberg received the Ibsen Prize in 2012, has now been produced 25 times, but hardly played in Norway, and the play is played in Porsgrunn for the first time during the PIT festival.

Fredrik Brattberg is also the Norwegian playwright who is most played abroad, after Jon Fosse and Arne Lygre. Repetitions and repetitions may seem to be the new Norwegian export item.

Although the Ibsen starting point is clear in the author (life within the private sphere, focus on the child, etc.), it is easy to place Brattberg in the context of the absurd theater tradition, for example after Samuel Beckett’s “While we wait for Godot” (1953). It is therefore not surprising that Brattberg received the Porsgrunn municipality’s culture prize, but also not that he has been nominated for the France playwright’s prize Le Prix Godot.

Israeli director, actor and theater researcher Raz Weiner staged the Brattberg play “The Returns” at the Jaffa Theater in Tel Aviv in 2021. The Jaffa Theater has one Israeli and one Palestinian theater company sharing the same stage. During the rehearsals for “The Returnings”, children were killed in fighting inside Gaza, which brought the repetitive and almost ritual in the text very close. Themes such as loss and grief are strongly rooted in both Jewish and Palestinian tradition and culture.

The returned son

The stage is an almost empty stage where a low-rise, white-painted rectangular platform (approx. 3×2 meters), located a little to the left of the center, with two armchairs, a coffee table with a table lamp, is set out. To the right, outside the delimited podium, is an orange puff that can be opened in the lid, some clothes are disordered on the outside.

The father, dressed in a blue dressing gown, and the mother, in light bright home clothes (both with slippers) enter the podium area; a narrow, A4-like stage room that mimics the couple’s apartment. Almost the entire room for action for the parents is here, but almost all the action is added to the text. The two actors address each other, or the audience, frontally, in the different levels of the text.

The son Gustav has not returned home. Gustav has been on the mountain with some friends, and has not returned, no one knows where he is. The parents are overwhelmed by the grief. And then, one day, there is a knock on the door. The son has returned.

This homecoming scene takes place eight times in Brattberg’s text. Had the playwright Brattberg been the playwright Jon Fosse, he would have cultivated this situation where the parents’ feeling of sadness and emptiness as in the first scene throughout the play.

But Brattberg breaks with Fosse’s structure, and therefore repeats the homecoming scene seven times in different variations, a move that breaks the realistic. As an audience, we can impossibly accept the premises of the parents’ actions as a coherent narrative. The performance turns into the absurd.

Slaves of grief

Weiner states the potential for the rigidity of grief as a motivation for staging Brattberg’s plays. Where Brattberg prefers ordinary people and does not want to write theatrical texts about major overarching political issues, but about the small everyday details within the private sphere, Weiner explains that he uses “The Returns” as a starting point for a critique of Jewish politicians using the endless Jewish mourning process over the Holocaust and a thousand years of diaspora for income for their own policies.

But this critical perspective disappears a bit in the performance since the character Gustav literally takes over the game and almost (intentionally) invades Brattsberg’s text. The theme will be different, but not a lesser known problem – because what’s really wrong with the returned son? Why do his parents reject him completely?

Little Eyolf goes queer

Fredrik Brattberg’s text is an experimental play with the Ibsen conventions. While Ibsen’s little Eyolf completely fails as a son due to a physical disability, director Weiner’s Gustav has completely different challenges. Under Weiner’s direction, Gustav develops into a son who may not be at the top of conventional parents’ wish lists for his children, perhaps especially not for the sons.

Ibsen’s children

The parents’ lives take place on the limited white podium, but Gustav’s lives take place outside, he tries to invite the parents, outside the comfort zone, but fails. “I think he is dead” states the father – or is it hopeful? But the grief returns.

Under Weiner’s direction, Gustav strikes back. The struggle is no longer in the parents’ struggle against grief, but the struggle between Gustav and the parents, the child who wants acceptance and the parents who fight to get rid of the unacceptable child, a struggle the theater scene Gustav is doomed to lose, in the same way as Hedvig in « The Wild Duck »(1877) and Eyolf in« Little Eyolf »(1894).

The enchanting child Gustav dances in front of his parents, like a little devil with angel wings, in the clothes of a little ballerina with a magic wand (read: rhythmic gymnastics and classical ballet, well-known gay clichés) in transcending positions. It’s funny, infernal, rude, desperate and full of humiliation at the same time.

Under Weiner’s direction are also hints of a lost father. Weiner himself plays the role of Gustav’s father. Both father and son are broken down during the performance.

Finally, the parents break their necks in grief, in order to survive themselves: “Gustav is dead, we never missed him”. Where Brattberg’s text ends in a relentless revelation by the parents, Weiner adds a moral, albeit only a tiny little hope of a kind of community, no matter how helpless it is, where the audience is encouraged to break out in unison in “Tomorrow” from the children’s musical Annie , as a kind of political call to look ahead, and not repeat the mistakes of yesterday.

The grief over what is lost cannot last forever. Weiner replaces Brattberg’s absurd but merciless tragedy into a comedy, perhaps because the relationship between Israel and Palestine, which the director himself draws on as a background, is too serious for there to be any hope.

Facts

Text: Fredrik Brattberg

Director: Raz Weiner

Cast: Roni Yacobovitz, Shahaf Ifhar, Tom Idelson

Producer: Jaffa Theater, Tel Aviv, 2021-

Venue: Grenland Friteater during Porsgrunn International Theater Festival