Norwegian playwright, Jon Fosse, brings his latest play to the Edinburgh International Festival - "The Girl on the Sofa".

It's themes include burgeoning sexuality, adultery and betrayal.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 16 August 2002

KIRSTY WARK:
This was meant to do for the festival what Gargarin Way did last year. Any chance?

IAN RANKIN:
No. This is a sumptuous play to look at, wonderful to watch, the set, light and action are terrific, very clever in parts.

But the problem with showing the banality of every day life is that it can seem banal when you are watching it.

I kept thinking of what Arthur Miller had done with similar material, flashbacks and family crises, none of it that was here, none of the highs and lows or twists you would expect that would jar your senses, it was just flat lining.

BONNIE GREER:
For me this was a complex play to look at as a playwright. This is a great writer. He's writing about a very trite situation, unfortunately.

He's able to put on stage something I've never seen before, which is different levels of consciousness actually interacting with one another.

We are used to in Anglo American theatre, I mean Irish, Scottish and Welsh as well, action on the stage, resolution, this kind of straight narrative. This man puts on stage what European play-wrighting is really about.

It explores consciousness on different levels. He puts on the stage the child, the woman, looking at herself. He puts the woman thinking about herself as a child, the child thinking about herself as a victim.

KIRSTY WARK:
Is it emotionally incredibly arid?

BONNIE GREER:
No, because what you are watching is the interchanges, a very brave act for the woman to dissect an incident in her life that she cannot understand, which makes her sterile as an artist.

The situation is trite because he puts a woman on stage who is a boring individual, but the concept of the play and its technique is absolutely stunning.

SIMON ARMITAGE:
I thought the language was unforgivable. Plays are supposed to sound like speech, not like writing.

The terrible crime of this play is that it didn't sound a bit like a conversation that might be going on in a sailor's house, but like a conversation going on in a playwright's house.

The theme, I can't paint because I had a messed up childhood, so go and work in a shoe shop, deal with it.

BONNIE GREER:
The theme is trite, that is what was unforgivable. The language is not sent out to us, this is a person remembering something.

We don't remember in big swathes like that, we remember things that go back and forth as we are trying to make something make sense. He has the courage to put that on the stage.

SIMON ARMITAGE:
We don't remember in repetitive prose sentences.

BONNIE GREER:
Sure we do, because you are trying to break down something you don't understand; you remember moments, people doing things you are not sure about.

IAN RANKIN:
Don't you think, this messed up adulthood, something shocking must have happened, there must have been an incident?

BONNIE GREER:
We want an incident, but that is not how life works.

IAN RANKIN:
If you're paying your 15 or 20 quid, you want it.

BONNIE GREER:
This is about the dullness and triteness of life.

IAN RANKIN:
That is why you go to the theatre?

BONNIE GREER:
No. You go to try to understand inner life.

KIRSTY WARK:
If you alienate your audience by the way you talk about that, isn't that a crime?

BONNIE GREER:
You are not alienating them. Our audiences are alienated because of what Ian said. We want the big bang.

KIRSTY WARK:
Is it our fault?

BONNIE GREER:
No, it is because we are used to that kind of theatre, that's what we want.

Unfortunately, if we are going to reflect life, which is what Shakespeare said the theatre should do, you have to reflect life on all levels, it is not a great series of incidents where we are trying to make sense out of things.

He has codified this and made it exist on a stage. I think he's a genius frankly.