Review Round-Ups

Review Round-up: Did Wind Blow Critics Away?

French director Patrice Chereau‘s production of I Am the Wind, which opened on Tuesday night (10 May 2011, previews from 26 April) at the Young Vic, tells the story of two men on a journey out to sea.

The action takes place on a fragile boat as the two men, Tom Brooke and John Laskey, referred to as “The One” and “The Other,” share drinks and a bite to eat, until they make the sudden decision to hit the open ocean. Surrounded by foreign islands and the threatening sea, the two men are bound together as they travel into the unknown.

Helmed by Chereau, the play is written by prolific and much-performed Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse and adapted for the London stage by Simon Stephens. Following its Young Vic premiere the piece will tour to Paris, Vienna, Lyon, Barcelona and Avignon this summer.

The production marks the first Chereau has ever originated in the UK and the first time his work has been seen in London since La Dispute in 1974. Did the production blow the critics away?


Michael Coveney
Whatsonstage.com
★★★★

“Blink, and a life is gone, gone with the wind, or even on the wind. Tom Brooke at the Young Vic simply ‘is’ the wind. He’s on a boat with Jack Laskey, and they meld into the horizon. Nebulous isn’t the word
for Norwegian dramatist Jon Fosse‘s play, done into English by Simon Stephens. Non-existent is nearer the mark, as in essentially and existentially non-existent. And yet this strange, irritating piece of post-Beckettian, self-erasing fiddle-faddle exerts a beguiling, hypnotic pull. Patrice Chereau‘s production… is unusual, extraordinary, weird, and beautiful … Laskey as The Other carries Brooke as The One to the sea’s edge … Are they brothers, lovers, companions? They go on a journey. A simple raft heaves out of the floor on a hydraulic lift. The men climb aboard… and then, alarmingly, head out to the open sea. Suddenly, it all becomes incredibly exciting … Brooke, who looks like a boomerang, or an emaciated banana, says he is a concrete wall that’s cracking to pieces. He’s helpless. Laskey’s just hopeless, concerned about Brooke, eventually lost, heading towards a lighthouse on the hostile waters. Make of it what you will. But you must see Chéreau’s work.”

Michael Billington
Guardian
★★★★

“Both Jon Fosse and Patrice Chereau, the Norwegian author and French director of this strange piece,
have said in advance they expect to be critically slaughtered. Yet just as… I admired Fosse’s Nightsongs and The Girl On The Sofa, so I found myself absorbed by this 70-minute play;
and, whatever it may mean, there is no denying the production’s visual bravura. As before, Fosse jettisons all the conventional rules of drama. His characters have neither proper names nor social background and there is no easily extractable message. We are simply presented with two men in a boat. The One (Tom Brooke) is a practised sailor and palpable depressive: The Other (Jack Laskey) is a nautical novice and pragmatic protector. The former persuades the latter to undertake a sea voyage and during their perilous journey, The One stumbles overboard and, resisting all attempts at rescue, becomes pantheistically part of nature … The relationship between the two actors is also intriguing … But they play off each other superbly and cope heroically with the piece’s physical demands … In the ineradicable central image lies, I suspect, much of the meaning of Fosse’s cryptically haunting play: the co-existence in all of us of the craving for death and the instinct for life.”

Charles Spencer
Daily Telegraph
★★

I hated this play while I was watching it. But, blow me down, I woke up this morning and found that I Am the Wind was still whirling round in my head like the twister in The Wizard of Oz. When a play adheres in the memory like this, it’s usually a sign that it has some merit. Certainly, the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse is very highly rated in Europe … Here, he remains an obscure figure. What little I’ve seen of his previous work… has struck me as both pretentious and terminally dull … This new piece, directed by the acclaimed French director Patrice Chéreau and translated by the prolific Simon Stephens, concerns two characters – The One and The Other, as they are tiresomely called … The play’s narrative is circular, and within a few minutes the
apparently dead man starts to talk and we realise that we are at the beginning of the boat trip that led to his death. The language is banal and repetitive, as Brooke describes what sound like the symptoms of clinical depression … As you will gather, there aren’t a lot of laughs here, even by Norwegian standards of gloom … Chéreau has evidently instructed the actors to speak in largely expressionless voices, but he delivers a dramatic coup when the theatre floor floods with
water and a raft comes up on a hydraulic lift … Even as I write, I realise all this sounds unbearably pretentious – and much of it is. Yet lurking in the depths of this 70-minute drama is a strong
apprehension of both the fleeting nature of human relationships and the terrible listlessness and lack of will that are symptomatic of chronic depression.”

Henry Hitchings
Evening Standard

★★

“Chéreau… is known here mainly for his films (Intimacy, La Reine Margot) and for his courageously unorthodox interpretations of opera. This production is also notable because it provides an opportunity to sample the recent efforts of Jon Fosse, the Norwegian polymath who, a little surprisingly, is Europe’s most performed living playwright … Two young men, whose names we never learn, are in more senses than one all at sea – aboard a boat or alongside it. We aren’t clear where the two
men are or what their relationship is … Tom Brooke plays the more febrile of the two. Meanwhile
Jack Laskey listens, nurtures, and plies him with questions. Both actors are excellenu … But their vivid simplicity isn’t enough to warrant sitting through an hour and 10 minutes (it feels longer) of Fosse’s repetitive, circular minimalism, which leaves us with little more than the idea that life is a journey … What’s billed as an odyssey is in fact a rather stiff-legged meander. Chéreau’s direction emphasises the rhythmic and at the same time calculatedly fractured nature of Fosse’s writing. It also accentuates a point that… is central to Stephens’s thinking about theatre: language is simply noise, a fringe around the essential physicality of the medium. Yet the physical dimension of I Am the Wind is neither poetic nor moving … Fosse, plumbing the depths of human experience, has created a work that seems unbearably bleak and listless.”

Dominic Maxwell
The Times
★★★

“There is certainly plenty to admire in Patrice Chereau‘s evocative production. But I can also see why, though the Norwegian Fosse is one of the most performed playwrights in the world … There are some rich images in this show, which follows a depressive character (The One) and his more even-keeled companion (The Other) as they undertake a fatal sailing trip. Their boat, stunningly realised in Richard Peduzzi‘s design as a tilting platform that rises out of the water that fills the Young Vic stage, is
some sort of symbol of the self … Are these two characters friends? Lovers? Two aspects of one self? But incident is incidental here, so as the pair moor and have a picnic, and as Jack Laskey‘s open-hearted Other trails Tom Brooke‘s restlessly introverted One, it’s hard to know whether this boat trip is just a metaphor for depression or, well, a boat trip … Even at only 70 minutes, this drags. But if I couldn’t believe in the words, if the poetical mixture of the banal and the portentous didn’t put the wind in my sails, the actors always look as if they know why this matters, as if they believe entirely in what’s happening. That’s not quite a recommendation. But this is a show that intrigues and annoys, beguiles and bores, and does it with some style.”

– Brenna Weingus