Young Vic, London
You can't beat a pre-emptive strike. 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, in opposition to the majority, 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.
You can take this in any number of ways. At times, the play seems like a marine Waiting For Godot with two inter-dependent figures confronting the pointlessness of existence. At other times, in Simon Stephens's version, it seems like a meditation on language: as The One protests about the bare approximation of what he feels to what he says, I was reminded of TS Eliot's Sweeney vainly crying "I gotta use words when I talk to you." The characters may even be dual aspects of one person: the suicidal life-denier and the sociable survivor. However you interpret it, the play grips because it appeals to something fundamental: it shows two cornered human beings in an extreme situation and demonstrates the power of love.
That seems the key to Chereau's hypnotic production, which begins with a long, wordless passage in which one man swathes his shivering, half-naked partner in warm clothing. The relationship between the two actors is also intriguing. Brooke, with his curved, playing-card profile, is restless, questing and manically contradictory: Laskey, in contrast, is still, cautious and reassuringly consistent. But they play off each other superbly and cope heroically with the piece's physical demands.
Richard Peduzzi, who designed Chereau's famous Ring cycle, has come up with a water-filled set dominated by a raft that rises, falls, tilts and rocks in simulation of a boat's movements and leaves the actors struggling to achieve balance. 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.