A Remarkable Person

It takes a while to fathom quite what Norwegian playwright Pernille Dahl Johnsen’s play is; what it’s trying to say. Part dense philosophical tract on the nature of identity, part absurdist comedy, part stream of consciousness, it looks at personality and self and how we’re all defined by others. 

An author is writing the biggest book of her career. But she’s stuck inside her own head, thinking a lot about her own funeral. At first it seems like these two actors, Kristine Myhre Tunheim and Johnsen (who acts in it as well as having written it) are two different characters. Slowly it becomes clear that they’re the same person and we’re in the mind of this author. 

A third piece of her mind joins in, played by Espen Oestman, and these different shards of her identity talk to each other, discussing exactly what ‘identity’ even is. She imagines she’s on a chat show, she imagines she’s talking to book critics, she tries to come to terms with the idea that—as much as we think we’re being ourselves—identity only exists when it’s observed by others. The more she thinks about who she is, the more stubborn her writer’s block becomes. 

Structurally the play is one big amorphous blob. But it’s often funny, in an oblique and deadpan sort of way, and sometimes profound. The result, perhaps, of what would’ve happened if Sartre had written Inside Out.