on Fosse is a major figure in the modern literature of Norway. Initially establishing his reputation as a novelist, he has largely worked as a dramatist since the mid-1990s and his work has been extensively performed across Europe and in the U.S.A. He has been widely described as the most important Norwegian dramatist since Ibsen. He writes in a very austere fashion, brief speeches often repetitively patterned. Someone is Going to Come (Nokon kjem til å komme) was first performed in 1996. A later Parisian production of the play prompted Le Monde to describe him as “the Beckett of the 21st century”. Knut Vaage (working in collaboration with Fosse) adapted Fosse’s play as the libretto for his own one act opera, which was premiered in 2000. The text has a distinctive poetry, creating through its highly patterned language a powerful exploration of the tensions inherent in human relationships; it occupies a theatrical idiom which, paradoxically, straddles the boundaries between realism and absurdism. It presents an elemental theatrical situation in simple language. A man and a woman seek – so they say and perhaps so they believe – to be alone together; they have bought a very isolated old house near the sea; we know nothing of them, they are called simply ‘He’ and ‘She’. The tensions in their relationship are hinted at; another character (‘The Man’) appears briefly. The house, which was formerly occupied by the grandmother of ‘The Man’, is gradually revealed to contain disturbing reminders of its previous occupants – from photos on the walls to an unmade bed, right down to an unemptied chamber pot. ‘The Man’ makes a pass at ‘She’. The cracks between ‘He’ and ‘She’ widen.