This 70-minute show from acclaimed French director Patrice Chereau is the best and the worst production I’ve seen this year: the beauty of its acting and staging is unforgettable, yet the script – Simon Stephens’s version of Norwegian Jon Fosse’s play – is either untranslatable, or, to pragmatic ears, nonsensical. It’s no spoiler to reveal that it’s about a suicide: that’s obvious from the opening when a damp barefoot man (Jack Laskey’s The Other) cradles The One (Tom Brooke) in a sodden pietà.
Wet sand stretches right up to the toes of the audience, and a pool of seawater ebbs and flows in the centre, reflecting the men’s hands and feet and the feelings that scud across their faces, with remorseless clarity. If only that clarity extended to the script.
The dialogue between the suicidal One and puzzled Other is as leaden and motiveless as the depression it portrays. Fosse is Norway’s second-biggest playwright after Ibsen, but ‘I Am the Wind’ plays like Beckett without the humour, or Pinter without the danger.
Laskey – and especially Brooke – lend deep-rooted authenticity to this monotonous study of emptiness. And designer Richard Peduzzi has created an astonishing boat for The One to leap off: a hidden raft that rises in a four-sided waterfall from its invisible berth in the centre of the water then tilts and lilts, on a mechanical arm, supplying a poetry in motion that makes the silences many fathoms deeper than the speeches.