The Name

A pregnant girl returns home with her boyfriend. The meeting with her family is caught in the traps of ineffective communication. Once she and her boyfriend are left alone and start selecting a name for their child, insecurity begins to eat into their enthusiasm about the future …

We humans carry the pulsing burden of our ancestors inside us. A large part of our identity is the living remains of what our families have preserved and nurtured. Families inscribe history into themselves; they record times that have shaped them over decades, centuries. We carry with us every defeat and all the victories of our ancestors who can be heard through our voices and act through our actions. This living pulse of our forefathers inside us is the baggage we carry with us and can only unload when we become aware of it.

The eternal spiral that moves from past to future and keeps returning to the same point, as it ebbs and flows, is the central thought of Fosse’s play. We are all only parts of a long procession – a part of an endless chain, a segment of the unbroken line of humankind, at the same time the descendants of our ancestors and the ancestors of our children. And there is only one point on this spiral of time that allows for change when we can decide what seed of the future we will become, what kind of world we will leave behind instead of the one we inherited. The point of change is a human, an individual. It is us, the point in which the past and the future meet, the point of the present.

Fosse’s The Name contemplates the family and the individual inside it. The research of our families, our patterns, their studying and evaluation is also the starting point of the production.

The Norwegian Jon Fosse is considered one of the most creative contemporary playwrights, and it was The Name that made him a world success in the mid-1990s. His plays, novels and poetry have been translated into more than forty languages. In addition to many awards, he also holds the flattering title “new Ibsen”, although his writing is closer to Beckett or Pinter. The first Slovenian production of The Name is  directed by Ajda Valcl, whose last direction in Nova Gorica was Cocteau’s monodrama The Human Voice.