REVIEWS

Mark Hopkins
Sydney Morning Herald
July 11, 2005

In warm embrace a young woman kisses her mysterious male friend in misty rain.

With eyes averted her parents are immobilised in guilt and grief. In this highly charged moment a youth suicide is enacted on stage with haunting sensitivity. Any ambivalence about its tragedy vanishes as in death the daughter speaks with directness not evident in life: "I didn't want to do it. I shouldn't have done it. I regret it."

Death Variations, perceptively translated by May-Brit Akerholt, is an intricate play.

The action is essentially retrospective. Older Woman (Linda Cropper) confronts her former husband, Older Man (Patrick Dickson), with news of their daughter's death. Incomplete sentences establish a shared rhythm of jagged grief in ironic contradiction to their psychological unconnectedness. Into the gaps in strained conversation arrive their younger selves. Younger Woman (Luisa Hastings Edge) is nine months pregnant and Younger Man (David Lyons) has moved them into a damp basement to begin their family.

Past and present intertwine as their daughter (Bojana Novakovic) is seen to grow to maturity through interaction with her parents and an indefinable Friend (Ben Ager).

Emotional and psychological experiences are suggested as shaping destiny as well as character. Relationships, real and imagined, are critical to the texture of the piece. The text demands a tightrope be walked between the intensity of suppressed emotion and the banality of dialogue that masks hidden feelings. Fosse and Akerholt's translation excel in finding estrangement in familiar exchanges.

Joseph Uchitel's production walks this tightrope with varying degrees of surety: sometimes underplaying the suppressed feelings, sometimes overstating the emotion in the spoken exchanges. It starts at a heightened pitch and Max Lyandvert's initially intrusive sound design suggests a deliberate directorial urgency. Once the performance rhythms settle and the audience is trusted to find the unspoken in the text, the production soars.

Stark set design (Karla Urizar) and bold staging decisions achieve symbolic nuance.

Intelligent performances assist clarity, with Lyons and Edge convincing. Dickson and especially Cropper sustain emotional authenticity however stylised staging or text become. Ager achieves a delicate balance in characterisation between the real and imaginary. Novakovic employs equal subtlety in early scenes but is exceptionally compelling when, in the last 10 minutes, text and production merge in exquisite harmony: the final unfinished sentence cutting something beautiful cruelly short.

Jo Higgins
State of the Arts
July 12, 2005

When Death Variations was performed in London a critic from The Guardian noted playwright Jon Fosse's deadly accuracy in his capturing of the verbal and emotional inarticulacy of his characters. A work that deals not just with death, but with youth suicide; a work that is about our innate human inability ­ and fear ­ of saying what we feel; and a work that is unapologetically theatrical in its execution, Fosse's Death Variations is a difficult, but nonetheless compelling and poetic study of one of our most complicated shortcomings as 'communicative' human beings.

Death Variations begins with a mature couple (Linda Cropper and Patrick Dickson) struggling to come to terms with the suicide of their only daughter. David Lyons and Luisa Hastings Edge are their younger, idealistic selves and the four of them occupy the stage, with a simple lighting adjustment indicating which moment we are in. All four actors physically and verbally capture that inarticulacy and the 'unsaid'. Dickson's Older Man remains physically in the one spot until the very end ­ as if there is some sort of invisible field he is unable to penetrate while the other three pace anxiously, but again, are unable to ever really leave the space.

As the Daughter, Bojana Novakovic is mesmerising. The Older Woman, having come from identifying her in the opening scene, is haunted ­ "her face was empty". Novakovic captures this emptiness even as the Daughter in life and her mysterious Friend (Ben Ager) ­ who travels an ambivalent path between real and imagined, dangerous and safe, extends the void in which she exists. This Friend is not a literal being ­ and it remains unclear throughout if he is in fact 'death' or just her inner 'darkness'. Their seesawing relationship between intimacy and rejection drives the tragedy that you can see unfolding ­ and that he is invisible to the others ­ and that they, really, are invisible to each other, makes Death Variations achingly real in its rendering of that inability to express how you feel ­ even unto yourself.

This idea of expressing the unsaid and the absent, of representing and exploring the unsayable ­ and the unseeable ­ is deftly translated in Karla Urizar's set design. A stark white set is filled only with two transparent chairs, a transparent suitcase and an empty white frame that hangs innocuously on the wall. It sounds an obvious sort of visual translation but such is Fosse's dialogue that genuine, literal clutter would have been extremely distracting. The only organic elements of the set are the large panes of glass, visible through the open doorways, on which quite heavy rain continues to sheet, providing an ongoing dulcet sort of soundtrack. As the play builds to its inevitable end the Daughter talks of her anguish and confusion and she notes that "nothing is as lucid as pain and rain I didn't want to do it but everything was black and wet."

Death Variations offers little solace for its characters. Despite the Daughter's remorse ­ "I regret it," she says. "I want to come back" ­ there remains a darkness and an unrelenting sense that, inherent in all of us is this solitary place where we each are inarticulate, even to ourselves. The Daughter wants to come back, but she wants to come back because she "want(s) to be alone again". This is a beautiful production of a poetic but very real script whose dark resonances are perhaps more universal than we would like to admit.

Skye Crawford
Broadway Australia
July 12, 2005

There is unpredictability, a non-comprehension and a sheer unbelievability that surrounds the actuality of death. Joseph Uchitel's production of Jon Fosse's Death Variations is a soulful and languid look at death and its affects.

A divorced couple are forced to communicate with each other when their only daughter dies. Their fractured and yet compelling conversation that wrestles between shared grief and unsupressable anger at each other has the text moving effortlessly between past and present, memory and reality.

We see the jaded couple as pregnant, young and struggling (played by David Lyons and Luisa Hastings Edge) and then their distant and awkward relationships with their daughter as she grows older and witnesses their divorce. The ex wife has come to explain to her ex husband that their daughter is dead. He says 'you have to leave because I cannot bear to see your face'. She says she wants to but she can't. They don't want to see each other, but feel it necessary to be near the other human being who helped create the person, their daughter who is now dead. Older Woman (Linda Cropper) and Older Man (Patrick Dickson) command the stage, performing with both clarity and depth, while using few words, and instead create the intensity of both emotion and distance through pauses and expression.

Daughter's (Bojana Novakovic) death is flirted with throughout the play. Her 'strange' Friend (Ben Ager), who seems to represent death itself, tries to keep his distance, while wanting and craving to take Daughter into his world. Both succeed in getting what they want, with the young girl's death depicted beautifully in the warm gesture of a passionate embrace, watched through a mist of rain.

Following her character's death, and with great clarity and compassion Novakovic allows us to witness Daughter regretting death and we see wholeheartedly the unjustness of life's fragility and tangibility.

A translated play can often be deflated in its transition between languages, because often meaning that is very present in the original text does not flow across in the translation. With Death Variations the European flavour is well and truly kept alive by May-Brit Akerholt's complex and creative translation. The expression and characters remain true to their European roots. In fact the only Australianness about the play is the actors voices.

The language of this production envelopes and clings like fog and the characters take pleasure in pausing and in repetition. The pauses are full of meaning and seem to speak without words. Fosse's work does not spell things out, but instead allows the audience to find their own path. We look through the eyes of the humans on stage, living out their ordinary lives, full of the joy of birth, the anguish of a break up, and the helplessness of death, which affects both the living and the one who looks death in the eyes.

The set is sterile, white, with transparent Perspex chairs, a lamp and an empty frame, and occasionally, an empty see through suitcase. The space only comes alive when the characters are present. The uncluttered set's simplicity leaves an open platform for the audience to concentrate almost completely on the journey of the characters.

Stephen Hawker's lighting design is exquisite. Shadow and light create a morose and often sombre affect, with rain shadows dribbling down the walls, and whiter light when 'Death' or as the character is called, Friend enters the space.

The production as a whole is slick and clean, while at the same time through the poetic language, the production is both sparing and indulgent with words, and always harrowingly honest. Death Variations takes a stark and straightforward look at humanity and the fact we live, suffer pain and experience joy and then we die. Whether it be our choice or not, we at some point must look death in the eye. For some death hangs around. In the Daughter's case death is like a friend. For others it is something to be frightened of. Fosse is not afraid to tackle the ordinary, yet very real issues for so many, and he does it with classic style and a sense of understanding and curiosity for what exists in our world and beyond.

Martin Portus
Sydney Star Observer

At home in Norway the playwright Jon Fosse is reportedly dubbed their new Ibsen and even the new century's Beckett. He is a playwright fascinated in the "voice which comes from what is not spoken", those gaps of real meaning when we are struggling to communicate something important.

In this translation and beautiful Sydney production of his play, Death Variations, it is two parents trying to understand the suicide of their daughter. They come up with a hopeless litany of repetitions, stumblings and clichés but Linda Cropper and Patrick Dickson manage to bring real depth to their grief, to the gaps between the words. They recoil from each other, from the grief in each others faces.

We are in a stark glossy white space with windows weeping with rain. Spotlit through the doorways come their younger selves, she unexpectedly pregnant and he keen but ineffectual. Their marriage eventually splits but these younger parents watch their daughter grow, take on a rather sinister male "friend" and then disappear in the sea.

Soviet-born director Joseph Uchitel conducts Death Variations, and the intermingling of the six characters, with orchestral precision. A soundscape from Max Lyandvert punctuates this short chamber piece with effective exclamation and long cello sounds.

Fosse is no Ibsen. He does not give us satisfactorily complete characters under recognisable social pressures. The daughter's suicide remains inexplicable although young Bojana Novakovic is brilliant in the role, at being truthful as a lonely teenager but also as a poetic enigma. Since her AFI award last year for best actress, playing the young refugee in the ABC series, Marking Time, Novakovic has been a performer to watch. But the play is more about grief and the impact of her suicide rather than the social reasons for it.

Having said that, Death Variations in the hands of a lesser director could easily have become deathly repetitive. The play has been effectively translated by May-Brit Akerholt, adding nuances to the pauses and near repetitions of hesitant language. It could so easily have become a tedious one idea play ­ and it's a short play ­ without Uchitel's skill in restraining the abstractions and creating an ensemble truthful style. Death Variations has an icy clarity and yet a human warmth. Its production standards are also high with this, deservedly, being the first fully funded production from Uchitel's East Coast Theatre Company.