Der Name

This family get-together is insanely uneventful. DER NAME (“The Name”) is possibly the best play by Jon Fosse, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2023, whose life’s work was recently recognised with the Ludwig Mülheim Theatre Prize. After a long time away, a girl finally returns home to her family. She is extremely pregnant; the situation is awkward and potentially highly explosive. She is accompanied by the child’s future father, whom none of the others have met before. Her mother is ill, her father taciturn and worn out, and her sister is looking for someone to play with. Nobody—literally nobody—thinks to ask the girl what her boyfriend’s name is. He wishes he were invisible, retreats into a corner, and reads a book. There is violence in the air. And then nothing happens. Well, nothing seems to happen. Because there’s the silence. And Jon Fosse uses it like a magician. The silence rumbles on until everyone is speaking to each other again – but do they understand each other? Don’t they need – as Georg Büchner once suggested – “to crack open their skulls and pull the thoughts out of each other’s brain fibres”? When language fails: what does it mean to be part of human society? Kay Voges fuses wild poetic simplicity and gallows humour into a sophisticatedly structured score.