The Girl on the Sofa

(Paperback)

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Description

A girl on the verge of adulthood is sitting on a sofa. She is unhappy: she resents her mother and older sister and longs for her absent father, a sailor. What is she going to do with her life She considers becoming a painter...A woman approaching middle age is painting a self-portrait. She is watching her younger self: the girl on the sofa. The Girl on the Sofa juxtaposes two stories from the life of one woman and explores the complex interweaving of the past with the present. It is a new play by Norway's leading playwright Jon Fosse. His intense, poetic and often disturbing writing probes and lays bare human emotions. The Girl on the Sofa is given its world premiere in a version by acclaimed Scots playwright David Harrower, at the Royal Lyceum Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2002.

Reviews

Brilliant - Paradoxically, it creates something of great aesthetic beauty out of a work that deals with painter's block * Guardian *

Author Bio

Jon Fosse's work includes novels, poetry, essays and books for children. He is one of the most produced playwrights in Europe and his plays have been translated into more than forty languages. Oberon Books publishes Plays One (Someone Is Going to Come, The Name, The Guitar Man, The Child), Plays Three (Mother and Child, Sleep my Baby Sleep, Afternoon, Beautiful, Death Variations), Plays Four (And We'll Never Be Parted, The Son, Visits, Meanwhile the Lights Go Down and Everything Becomes Black), Plays Five (Suzannah, Living Secretly, The Dead Dogs, A Red Butterfly's Wing, Warm, Telemakos, Sleep), Nightsongs, The Girl on the Sofa and I Am The Wind. Fosse was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Merite of France in 2007 and received The International Ibsen Award in 2010.