The dynamic between audience and performer is vital to theatre, so what happens when it is imperilled? Einkvan (Everyman), written by the Nobel-winning novelist and playwright Jon Fosse and directed by Kjersti Horn, puts that idea to the test, hiding the entire stage behind fogged plastic curtains suggestive of a sinister clinic. The six-person cast register only as vaguely shifting shapes, though their faces are filmed in tight closeup by two cameras; the images are then relayed to the auditorium on a pair of screens above the stage and accompanied by the cryptic Norwegian dialogue in surtitles. The effect is contradictory. We are so intimate with these actors that we can count every pore on their faces and even see the ring-lights reflected in their eyes, but we are also simultaneously held at arm’s length.
That discord mirrors the play’s themes of estrangement and solitude, the need for human contact locked in a violent struggle with the thirst for autonomy. The opening closeups form a diptych of the same face shot from different angles as a man lies in the bath fretting over the possibility that someone is watching or following him. Someone other than the camera operator, presumably.
He doesn’t have both screens to himself for long. Soon, a second male face appears on the right. Are they old flames? Siblings? Or, given the Bergmanesque mood, two halves of the same personality? The possibilities shift as readily as the camera angles. Other pairs of doppelgangers take their turn in closeup, each making some parental claim on the younger duo. The bathwater becomes redolent less of a soak in the tub than the suspension of a foetus in amniotic fluid. Never mind cutting the apron strings: the son seems barely to have departed the womb.
Among this opaque production’s more expressive elements is Oscar Udbye’s lighting, which allows the pale antiseptic chill to give way now and then to a warming orange glow that defrosts the stage before the next emotional ice age sets in. In Erik Hedin’s score, a piano motif surfaces from the eerie ambient hum before plunging, like the son in his bathtub, back beneath the surface again.
• At the Coronet theatre, London, until 17 May
