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About Jon Fosse

The Guitar Man

An introduction by Louis Muinzer

Jon Fosse on "Internet Theatre": The Guitar Man--a play for staging

Currently being performed throughout Europe, Jon Fosse is surely the most-staged Norwegian dramatist since Henrik Ibsen. The following script invites production groups everywhere in the English-speaking world to sample his work and find out why. The Guitar Man was written in 1994, but not published until late 1997. To the best of my knowledge, it has been staged only once so far and then in Danish. An Irish production of the present translation is currently being planned, but English-speaking professional and amateur companies everywhere are invited to stage the play for themselves. Requiring but a single actor and a rudimentary set, this one-man-play offers a good opportunity for the on-stage exploration of an important new dramatist.
As the adventuresome director and his actor will discover, however, Jon Fosse is not so easy to stage as he may first appear. Writing in short, repetitious lines of verse, he requires a good sense of rhythm--a "feel" for a kind of language that relates speech to silence, as well as line to line. With his voice, the actor must create a current of feeling that seems to defy the characteristically simple--even commonplace--words of the script itself. Fosse's language seems to suggest a level of experience beyond language--a level that most of us bury within us as we grow assured and facile in the use of words.
While every Fosse play features its own verbal music, The Guitar Man does so in a very special way: the old busker in the play is himself a singer--not a good singer, he tells us, but a singer nevertheless. As he unfolds his life to his only companions--the audience--the Guitar Man often sings what he says as spontaneously as most of us speak. How this will be handled in performance will probably depend on the folk-music tradition native to the actor or the character as he conceives it. In reading the script aloud for a group of theatrical friends, I, as a misplaced American, found that the busker's musical dialogue "came out" as improvised blues.
In addition to its evocation of Fosse-speak, The Guitar Man offers a good introduction to the human habitat of Jon Fosse's plays: a stage-scape of loners who, like this busker, move on the fringes of "ordinary" society or who live among people that their inadequate words can seldom reach--a world of people who are lonely on their own or together. But when their walled-in voices break through suddenly, the effect is eloquent and unforgettable, for they know or at least wonder about more of our common humanity than its loneliness. The brother-on-stage of Beckett and Pinter, Fosse approaches them with implicit sympathy, sometimes with humour.
So, on behalf of the dramatist and myself, I offer you this English text of The Guitar Man. As long as your busker is an outsider in the world his audience, you can make of him what you will: a black singer in a white-dominated society...a man with a rich Cork brogue on the streets of Belfast...an Asian or an Australian in a London underpass...a singer of "lonesome songs" from Georgia in downtown Minneapolis...or whatever else best suits your stage. In the script, the Guitar Man jingles British or Irish coins, but in your production he must jingle your own. In the script, too, his idiom is that which seems natural to me, but you must also make that your own.
But one thing I ask of you: at the end of the play, when the Guitar Man lights a final cigarette, let him pause before he leaves you and let him nod and give a small, farewell smile of recognition to the audience. I know him well now, and I know that his leave-taking may be tragic, but it is neither gloomy nor depressing. He is personal friend of mine. I hope that he will be yours, too.

For permission to stage The Guitar Man, please contact the dramatist's agent:

Berit Gullberg, Columbine Teaterforlag, Gaffelgrand 1A, 1130 Stockholm, Sweden.

For use of this English text of the play, I wave translator's royalities, but would appreciate hearing about any proposed productions; please send your e-mail to me at the present websight and it will be passed on. Good luck!

Louis Muinzer