Still
Waters
About Still Waters
About Lars Norén
Exceedingly comical, as always Norén gives us cause for laughter.
About Still Waters
Lars Norén directed his own play about six people and an uninvited guest.
STILL WATERS is part of a series of dramas written by Lars Norén on the boundary between life and death. The performance was a collaboration between the Jewish Theatre and Riksteatern-Riks drama.
About Lars Norén
Since the mid-1980s, Lars Norén has been Sweden’s nationally and internationally most played dramatist. His plays frequently provoke debate, but are nevertheless praised by audiences and critics alike. Norén is a prolific writer and is constantly exploring new formal idioms. The dialogue and an acute perception of spoken communication are characteristic of his work.
Lars Norén made his debut as a poet at 19, with Syrener, snö (Lilacs, Snow), and as a dramatist in 1973 with Fursteslickaren (The Prince-Licker). His real breakthrough as a dramatist came in 1982, with his semi-autobiographical Natten är dagens mor (Night is the Mother of Day), followed by Kaos är granne med Gud (Chaos is the Neighbour of God) in 1983.
With Personkrets 3:1 (Category 3:1) he stepped away from the restricted milieu of the family and took to the streets of Stockholm and the social outcasts, the ones who don’t have a voice in today’s society; a locked institution with prisoners who have committed serious crimes. The play was criticised, discussed and debated, since it contained partially documentary material from the lives of actual prisoners – who participated on stage.
In Skuggpojkarna (Shadow Boys) Lars Norén pursued his renderings of the environment and conditions in prisons and moved them into the public debate. The play November, which premiered at Det Norske Teatret in Oslo in 2001, directed by Lars Norén, is about death. The style is different, with a dreamier, absurd, existential tone. The same theme recurs in the one-act play Kommer och försvinner (Comes and Disappears), a fragmented, low-key, at times very comical, conversation about life and childhood.
Lars Norén’s drama, STILL WATERS, is yet another play in his series on the theme of death. It was played for the first time in Berlin in spring 2002, titled Tristano, and directed by Lars Norén himself. It played in Sweden in an adaptation titled STILL WATERS.
Lars Norén has been one of the artistic directors of Riks Drama at Riksteatern since 1998.
Participants in Still Waters
Written and directed by
Lars Norén
Daniel:
Etienne Glaser
Josef:
Stefan Sauk
Mattias:
Bengt CW Carlsson
Judith:
Eva Millberg
Sofia:
Annika Hallin
Emma:
Charlotta Larsson
Jonas:
Per Burell
Sets and costumes
Charles Koroly
Lighting
Erik Berglund
“Holiday travel and cooking, platitudes, polite conversation and serious exchanges, in layer upon layer.”
Review from Expressen
October 14, 2002
“Exceedingly comical, as always Norén gives us cause for laughter. Captivating, hopeless and sad in equal measures: people have only one another and their language, and yet they are mutually misunderstood strangers, historically and in the present.”
By Margareta Sörenson
“Norén allows scope for a humour that opens up the text and gives it abstract handles”
Review from Svenska Dagbladet
October 14, 2002
“Still Waters is a rich text, hilarious and horrific, but above all, substantial and full of reflecting facets in which we constantly catch glimpses of ourselves and our own situation… Still Waters is a group achievement, a totality made up of seven parts packed with aggressions, sorrow, and all sorts of laughs.”
By Lars Ring
“The audience is wise to keep their ears open, because that’s where it happens: in the script.”
Review from Dagens Nyheter
October 14, 2002
“The frantic tempo is crucial to maintaining the even inflection that makes the name of a French soft cheese sound as familiar as the name of a concentration camp. Benon or Bergen-Belsen – same difference, in the tacit namedropping that unites these cultural journalists and publishing editors… satire, in other words? Yes and no… and yes, Daniel’s and Emma’s dinner guests in black do look like paper dolls out of an interior design magazine with the bookshelves gaping empty. Sextuplets rather than individuals. But the satirical whip does not reign supreme at the Jewish Theatre, where Norén reverts to his text in an elegant and thought-provoking production.”
By Leif Zern
Gallery from Still Waters
Gallery from Still Waters
Gallery from Still Waters
Gallery from Still Waters
Gallery from Still Waters
Gallery from Still Waters
Gallery from Still Waters
Gallery from Still Waters
Gallery from Still Waters
Gallery from Still Waters
Gallery from Still Waters
Artistic design for Still Waters by Anders Wester
Artistic design for Still Waters by Anders Wester
Artistic design for Still Waters by Anders Wester
