Time is not linear. The room is not constant. It is not only that he can, as Lars Norén allows the first piece in his new trilogy get premiere finally, and in addition, has allowed the three pieces to be set up in three different opera house. It is not just that we should make the effort to keep up with in order: tonight’s premiere, then, is actually the first movement while the second and final third has already been set up, ”Vintermusik” directed by Sofia Jupither at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, 2017, and ”Poussière” directed by Norén himself at the Comédie-Française in Paris in 2018.
No, in particular, the set-up kongenialt with the material. The trilogy is about aging and parting. For the persons on the scene in the ”Andante” – a group of individuals in a serviced residence, all in varying stages of dementia or age change of the intellect, memory and personality – time is not linear, and the room is not constant. Memories of other times, mixed in quite naturally with the contrast of time, different life stories going on in parallel, or overlapping, without chronology. The same applies to the room, it is just as changeable and intangible, in front of their eyes. ”Do you know where you are?” ”Yes! No.”
the walls slowly in from the sides, and a ceiling lowered over the ancient chairs lined up on the floor. The walls and the ceiling looks like stone, perhaps as a tombstone with parts not yet fully adjoining and tillstängda. Or a chapel. Or it is a skene, the simple building in orchestrans fund during the classic Greek theatre. Theatre is often about life and death, pure content, but also has the existential quality of the built-in its essence.
It is a direct call to us to listen, try to follow musikaliteten and the rhythm of the game
Every moment of a set is only just now on the scene, everything that happens there, are born and die before our eyes – when we walk out of the salon is the evening’s works no longer. Dick Sandins and Noréns set design point to this. This is now a place for those who will soon die.
the Whole work breathes the sorrow, more sorrows. It is heavy in the air. It is a demanding set of look and feel, the audience is put in the hard work, and it is facilitated not by the screenplay and many galghumoristiska one liners. The musical tempobeteckning that constitutes the title means ”walking” and is on the quiet medeltempo, neither fast or slow. ”Do you hear the music?” asks Marika Lindstrom in the role of the woman ”A”. It is not just that she can hear music inside, without a direct appeal to us to listen, try to follow musikaliteten and the rhythm of the game.
the document, the group sits in their chairs and talking and sometimes occurs, the sequence of movements which resembles dancing, but it goes after the hand piece with the fragments of the narrative from their replicas. We see an example of Noréns development from the wordy, precise descriptor against the unpronounceable, impossible to put into words, quiet. The roles are beautifully broken written, as the crumbling images that give glimpses of the whole people and leaving much to the imagination. ”It is difficult to know who we are. Even more difficult is when those we come in contact with do not know”, says Monica stenbeck’s ”D”. Her room is full of her own famous books, as she herself has forgotten. Stenbeck sounds D’s intellectual references float by like clouds.
left behind despite the fact that many of the characters barely remember their professions. Sten Ljunggren and Carl Magnus Dellow do different portraits of aging men who worked with their hands. Per Mattsson portrays brilliantly the scornful architect, who designed the krematoriekapell, with hard, kept the bitterness from past traumas. Marika Lindström is as ingenious as his wife, the former doctor, oscillating between softness and aggressiveness. Erik Ehns and Nina Fex son-in-law, respectively, the daughter helps with the painful contrast from the world outside.
It is gently played by the entire ensemble, Noréns direction keeps the again and lace to increasingly. In the end moves the stone walls, once again, outwardly, a relief occurs when the tension release. At the same time is just a scary black nothing behind it. ”Andante” is a difficult and beautiful works.
Read more scenrecensioner from the DN of the Culture here.
