Lars Norén
Cold by Lars Norén
The play Cold revolves around four young men in their twenties, their relationships with one another. It is a study in youth violence, sick ideologies and impotence that is loosely based on a real story: a much-recognized murder case in Sweden.
His goal with Cold is to examine the language of males, the group and the power struggle between group and individual. He is convinced that an inability to express oneself causes violence, and his goal is to articulate this inarticulated wrath: a language that’s poor, that doesn’t express what the body can express. “I wanted to portray a rash outburst of powerlessness and violence.”
The play itself was not finished when initial rehearsals began and as a result became more of a basis for something, a kind of search instrument. The intention was for the actors to participate, to have an influence on the script. This method, to write in collaboration with the ensemble, was new to Norén.
My description of the process is about his work with the actors, and how the text is developed parallel to the direction. How Norén chooses the actors, explains to them what he is searching for and begins his work. Then, how the working climate and the creation grows. In many ways his directing process is reminiscent of his writing process, and it is interesting how he concentrates on the interplay between text and the language of the actors’ bodies. He seems compelled by a physical performance and speaks about invisible, spatial “strings” that connect the actors. The slightest breath or glance has an impact on all of them, he claims. He removes a line and simultaneously comments on the action: “The step says more.”
My analysis illuminates Norén’s body of work and how it is stamped by his long experience of psychoanalysis. To him the creative process consists of growing insights, while the finished works represent stages of knowledge. Cold, therefore, can be regarded as part of an ongoing spiral of knowledge. His choices of working methods are interesting; they hint at what he is searching for. I connect the method to the subject, the violence, and how this is connected to his creative process in general, his unwillingness to put a full stop, and his striving for perfection, in his writing.
I then observe how he in part uses actors as writing material. He often calls himself a “cannibal of reality” and searches for a naturalistic way to evolve, one that is trustworthy, one with a tone that is reminiscent of reality. There arises a conflict within the double role of author/director. Both to himself, what the matter actually is that he tries to control with the play, and to the actors as professional and private persons, what the character actually is that they are playing.
The production did not become what Norén thought it would. The process of directing actually reduced the process of writing.
My analysis attempts to demonstrate how Norén’s comments about “exactness” in the work with Cold are connected to the writer’s block he is about to be struck by. Norén’s development can be compared to Beckett’s, to the way Beckett moved towards the endpost of realism in minimalistic and precisely choreographed, sometimes wordless tableaus: the room of death.
Finally, I reflect, in a personal and speculative way, on Norén’s limits with Cold, on where they sit.
