Nightsongs (play)

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Nightsongs (Nynorsk : Natta syng sine songar) is a 1997 play by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse. It tells the story of a young couple who just had their first child. The man tries to become a writer but is constantly rejected by publishers while the woman is growing tired of their situation. The play premiered in 1997 at Rogaland Teater in Stavanger, directed by Kai Johnsen. [1]

Jon Fosse Norwegian writer

Jon Olav Fosse is a Norwegian author and dramatist.

Rogaland Teater theatre in Stavanger, Norway

Rogaland Teater is a theatre in Stavanger, Norway.

Stavanger Municipality in Norway

Stavanger is a city and municipality in Norway. It is the third largest city and metropolitan area in Norway and the administrative centre of Rogaland county. The municipality is the fourth most populous in Norway. Located on the Stavanger Peninsula in Southwest Norway, Stavanger counts its official founding year as 1125, the year the Stavanger Cathedral was completed. Stavanger's core is to a large degree 18th- and 19th-century wooden houses that are protected and considered part of the city's cultural heritage. This has caused the town centre and inner city to retain a small-town character with an unusually high ratio of detached houses, and has contributed significantly to spreading the city's population growth to outlying parts of Greater Stavanger.

Contents

Reception

Hans Rossin of Dagbladet compared the play to A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, and wrote: "But in terms of form, this is persistently Fosse. He continues to refine his linguistic minimalism with brief verbality on the surface and depths of emotions and charged situations below. Like earlier pieces, Nightsongs is also open in the sense that the realism in the texts can be put out as a straight depiction of a town where caricatured tough guys play the lead. Or they can be seen as abrupt and rather anti-realist allegories over human conditions in our time." [1]

<i>Dagbladet</i> Norwegian daily newspaper

Dagbladet is one of Norway's largest newspapers and has 1,400,000 daily readers on mobile, web and paper.

<i>A Dolls House</i> play by Henrik Ibsen

A Doll's House is a three-act play written by Norway's Henrik Ibsen. It premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month. The play is set in a Norwegian town circa 1879.

Henrik Ibsen Norwegian playwright and theatre director

Henrik Johan Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. As one of the founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as "the father of realism" and one of the most influential playwrights of his time. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, When We Dead Awaken, Pillars of Society, The Lady from the Sea, Rosmersholm, The Master Builder, and John Gabriel Borkman. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and by the early 20th century A Doll's House became the world's most performed play.

Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph reviewed the 2002 performance at the Royal Court Theatre in London: "The first line of Nightsongs is to prove eerily prophetic. 'I can't stand it any more. No I can't bear it.' It is a feeling likely to be shared by anyone unlucky enough to sit through this wretchedly pretentious, interminably boring drama by the Norwegian dramatist Jon Fosse. ... The aim of this infuriating piece is presumably to make the audience experience the same emotions as the characters on stage - depression, desperation, a terrible lassitude of spirit. It certainly succeeds, but what a perverse and pointless exercise." [2]

Charles Spencer is a British journalist. He was the chief drama critic of The Daily Telegraph from 1991 to 2014, having joined the paper in 1988. On 1 September 2014 it was announced that he had decided to take early retirement, and his final review for the paper appeared on the same day.

<i>The Daily Telegraph</i> British daily broadsheet newspaper

The Daily Telegraph, known online as The Telegraph, is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was founded by Arthur B. Sleigh in 1855 as Daily Telegraph & Courier.

Royal Court Theatre theatre on Sloane Square, Chelsea in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England

The Royal Court Theatre, at different times known as the Court Theatre, the New Chelsea Theatre, and the Belgravia Theatre, is a non-commercial West End theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England. In 1956 it was acquired by and remains the home of the English Stage Company and is notable for its contributions to contemporary theatre.

Adaptation

The play was the basis for the 2004 film Nightsongs . The film was a German production directed by Romuald Karmakar and starred Frank Giering and Anne Ratte-Polle. [3]

Romuald Karmakar German film director and screenwriter

Romuald Karmakar is a French film director, screenwriter and producer. He was born in Wiesbaden, Germany as the son of a Bengali father and a French mother. From 1977 to 1982 he lived in Athens. He has won several national and international awards, including the German National Film Award in Gold in 1996 for Der Totmacher (Deathmaker). His work has been honored with several retrospectives at festivals and cinematheques. In 2008, the MoMA celebrated his film Das Himmler-Projekt as one of the top 250 most important artistic acquisitions of the Museum since 1980. A member of Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Karmakar is internationally regarded for his honest representation of the less attractive aspects of society by focusing on those perpetrators responsible for these downfalls. Karmakar is currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2012–13). He has been invited as one of the four artists to represent Germany at the German Pavilion at the Art Venice Biennale in 2013.

Frank Giering was a German actor.

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Night Song or Night Songs or Nightsongs may relate to:

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References

  1. 1 2 Rossin, Hans (1997-09-07). "Dukkehjem 1997". Dagbladet (in Norwegian). Retrieved 2015-10-18. Men formmessig er dette usvikelig Fosse. Han viderefører rendyrkingen av sin språklige minimalisme med stutt verbalitet på overflaten og dybder av følelser og ladede situasjoner under. Som tidligere stykker, er også Natta syng sine songar åpen på den måten at realismen i tekstene kan utlegges som ren heimstaddiktning der karikerte hardinger har hovedrollen. Eller de kan sees som korthogne og snarere antirealistiske allegorier over menneskelige kår i vår tid.
  2. Spencer, Charles (2002-03-01). "Beckett without the jokes". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 2015-10-18.
  3. "Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder". Filmportal.de (in German). Deutsches Filminstitut . Retrieved 2015-10-18.

Further reading

University of Oslo Norwegian public research university

The University of Oslo, until 1939 named the Royal Frederick University, is the oldest university in Norway, located in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. Until 1 January 2016 it was the largest Norwegian institution of higher education in terms of size, now surpassed only by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The Academic Ranking of World Universities has ranked it the 58th best university in the world and the third best in the Nordic countries. In 2015, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranked it the 135th best university in the world and the seventh best in the Nordics. While in its 2016, Top 200 Rankings of European universities, the Times Higher Education listed the University of Oslo at 63rd, making it the highest ranked Norwegian university.