Jon Fosse Nokon Kjem Til A Komme

Understanding Jon Fosse Nokon Kjem Til A Komme

I have spent more time than I care to admit wrestling with staging this particular play, and the first thing you need to understand is that it is much shorter than people expect. Two scenes. Maybe fifteen minutes of actual spoken text when you are not padding it out for breath. The full title Jon Fosse Nokon Kjem Til A Komme translates to "Someone Is Coming," and it is the fourth play in his Septology. It deals with a couple waiting by a fire for a visitor who may or may not arrive, though the real tension lives in what they do while they wait. Fosse does not give you traditional stage directions. He does not tell you when someone sits, when they look away, or how long a silence lasts. The instructions are baked into the repetition itself. His characters say things like "Yes. Yes. Yes." and "Come in. Come in. Come in." and the rhythm of that repetition becomes the blocking. I learned this the hard way during a production where the director tried to impose conventional movement on actors who were simply standing still reading the text naturally. The result was stiff and lifeless. The play needs stillness. The action is internal. Start with the space. The play is set in a room, likely a kitchen or living area, with a fire. That is essentially the entire set. You do not need elaborate scenery. In fact, elaborate scenery will fight against the play. I once worked with a designer who built a fully realistic Norwegian interior — chairs, a table, a working stove, curtains. It took three weeks to strike and two weeks to rebuild between acts of other shows. We spent more time moving furniture than actually rehearsing. The next time around we used two chairs and a low wooden crate. Done in twenty minutes. The play works exactly as well if not better with less.

The casting is straightforward. Two roles. One man, one woman, though Fosse does not strictly define gender. I have seen it done with two women, two men, and even a non-binary pairing. The dynamic is a couple, plain and simple. The age range matters less than the chemistry. These two people need to feel like they have been together long enough to know exactly how the other breathes. If you cast two actors who seem polite toward each other, the play falls apart. There should be an undercurrent of something barely contained from the first line. The fire element deserves attention. A real fire is risky from a safety and insurance standpoint. Most venues will not allow an open flame near fabric curtains and wooden floors without extensive precautions. I used a high-quality electric fireplace insert with a realistic LED log set behind it. The heat is negligible, the safety profile is fine, and from the audience perspective it reads as warm and convincing. The alternative is lighting — practical lamps with amber gels aimed at a dark backdrop can suggest firelight without any of the liability. Do not skip the warmth in the lighting. Cold light on these actors makes the scene feel clinical instead of intimate, and that completely misses what the play is doing.

Common Pitfalls and What to Avoid

The biggest mistake directors make with this play is rushing it. The text is short, which tempts you to treat it like an icebreaker piece rather than a full production. At a recent workshop I observed, the director ran through the entire piece in under eight minutes because she was worried about holding the audience's attention. She did not understand that the audience is not being held hostage by plot. They are being asked to sit inside a mood. Eight minutes feels like nothing. Fifteen to twenty minutes of proper pacing lets the tension build to a point where the final lines land with actual weight. Another issue is overacting the waiting. The couple does not pace. They do not check watches. They do not perform anxiety in the conventional theatrical sense. Their restlessness is subtle — a shift in posture, a pause that lingers half a second too long, a glance toward the door that is immediately dismissed. I coached an actor who kept interpreting the text as genuine nervousness, shifting in his seat every time the door was mentioned. It looked like he had consumed too much caffeine. We spent an entire rehearsal day just having him sit perfectly still and say the lines while another actor watched him on camera. When he saw himself, he understood immediately that stillness was the performance. The translation you use matters more than you might think. There are English translations by Rosmarie Weber and by Michael Meyer, among others. Weber's version tends to be more literal and preserves more of the Norwegian syntactic awkwardness, which some find authentic and others find clunky. Meyer's is smoother and reads more naturally in English but loses some of the stark repetition that gives the original its rhythm. I recommend reading passages from both side by side before committing. For a staging that prioritizes the musicality of the language over strict fidelity to Norwegian grammar, Meyer usually works better. For a production that wants to emphasize the alienation and spare quality of the source text, go with Weber.

Technical Notes for Jon Fosse Nokon Kjem Til A Komme Productions

Sound design is minimal but critical. The knock at the door needs to be audible without being cartoonish. A recorded knock sounds hollow and artificial no matter how high quality the file is. I had a technician strike a wooden door frame with his knuckles off mic and we layered three different strikes with varying force. The result sounded human. The wind outside should be barely perceptible, more of a sub-bass rumble than a howling storm. You want the audience to feel the cold without consciously noticing it. Lighting cues are equally sparing. The piece moves from daylight warmth through whatever passes for dusk in a Fosse play into something darker. A simple fade from a warm wash to a deeper amber with a slight dropout in intensity does the job. Do not use sharp blackouts between the two scenes. The transition should feel like the room itself is settling, not like a commercial break.

Where the Production Actually Breaks Down

Let me be clear about something that will not help your ego: this play does not transfer well to large stages. I attempted it in a thrust configuration with a house capacity of four hundred and a half. The intimacy vanished completely. The audience could see the actors' micro-expressions from the orchestra but those same expressions looked lazy and undetailed from the balcony. Fosse's repetition relies on subtlety, and subtlety dies past about two hundred and fifty seats unless you invest heavily in close-up camera work projected on screen, which then raises its own set of problems around rights and visual focus. If your venue is larger than that, reconsider whether this is the right piece or consider a film adaptation approach instead. The play also does not lend itself well to festival programming where slots are tight. You cannot effectively pair it with a longer companion piece and expect audiences to stay engaged through both. The energy curve is flat and slow by design. After sixty minutes of similar pacing in another Fosse work, most people's attention fractures. I have seen houses empty during the interval of a double bill that included this play because the audience had already absorbed all the tension the first hour could give them. If you are looking for a starting point with the text itself, the official Norwegian publisher Capita Bibliofil handles the rights and distribution for Jon Fosse Nokon Kjem Til A Komme. Licensed scripts are available through their website and through Samuel French in English-speaking territories. Do not attempt to stage this from a pirated PDF. Fosse's estate is unusually active about enforcing performance rights compared to many contemporary playwrights, and the fines are proportional. The licensing fee for a small house production runs roughly between three hundred and six hundred dollars depending on seating capacity and number of performances, which is standard for contemporary drama and not inflated the way some classic plays have become.

The play works because it refuses to give you answers about who is coming, why they are coming, or whether they will actually arrive. That ambiguity is the entire point. Every production that tries to resolve it — by implying the visitor is death, or God, or a long-lost child, or memory itself — ends up with a clever reading that is still wrong. The text sustains the uncertainty on purpose. Your job as a director is not to solve the puzzle but to make the waiting feel real enough that the audience experiences their own impatience and discomfort as part of the piece. That is harder than it sounds and takes significantly more rehearsal time than the page length would suggest.