Two: Duologues and the Differend

Abstract

In April 2011, three major new plays opened in London. Jon Fosse’s I Am the Wind, directed by Patrice Chéreau, began a European tour at the Young Vic. It was a riddling, cryptic fable about two young men cast adrift on a raft on a perilous sea, one of them appearing eventually to drown. At the Southwark Playhouse, in a production directed by David Mercatali, Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm pitted a man and a woman against each other on a bare stage, telling athletic tales of bravery on a fantasy island, torn apart by numerous nameless catastrophes. Meanwhile, at the Royal Court, Simon Stephens’s Wastwater was a nervous, alienated triptych of scenes: the young man saying a long goodbye to a middle-aged woman, a couple meeting in a hotel room for sex, and a man apparently attempting to arrange to buy a child through an intermediary. These three plays by major authors — two British, one Norwegian — opened in prominent new writing theatres in the same month.¹ Something else they all had in common was that they are all told exclusively through duologues (or ‘two-handers’). In none of these plays are there ever more than two people on the stage.