Some People I Know

Some People I Know by Katrine Lunde and Andrew Wale was inspired by Japanese Kabuki theatre. Andrew Wale and Katrine Lunde explain it like this in their notes on the production:

"In this production we have included a few ideas from Kabuki Theatre.
The story takes place in a world with strongly defined borders – a small fjord filled with fruit trees and bound by mountains. The Kabuki stage is similarly limited. The upper stage border is often marked by boughs of painted fruit blossoms and the side borders by long, graphic banners. The audience is not asked to suspend its disbelief outside of the stage area.

Early Kabuki Theatre was performed on a low platform of compacted earth. Originally performed only by women, it was a type of dance theatre. Gods, spirits and the dead were considered to reside beneath the earth and it was believed that they could be brought forth by the performance above.

Something peculiar to Kabuki is the Hanamichi (or flower path) – traditionally, a shoulder-height walkway through the audience - which provides an actors’ most significant route to the playing space and the means by which characters make important journeys during the play. As an actor makes his entrance along the Hanamichi, he takes on the characteristics of his role. The division between actor and character is clearly announced, in a theatrical form where stylisation is believed to be more expressive than realism.

The role of the Mother incorporates another traditional element of Kabuki Theatre, that of the Stagehand. She is considered to be invisible. Essentially, she does not exist although she interacts physically and practically with the other characters. She brings on and removes props, helps the actors with on-stage costume changes and prompts when necessary.

Musical accompaniments to the scenes are semi-improvised by traditional musicians who follow the action closely and help guide the audience through the events taking place on stage.

We have chosen to use these ideas because they are useful to the storytelling. They are out of their natural context, and are therefore changed, but we hope they retain something of the intensely emotional and imaginative world from which they spring.

Signed by Andrew Wale and Katrine Lunde, 2008"

Andrew Wale also wrote a letter to the late Olav H. Hauge, published in the performance program of Some People I Know:

"Dear Mr. Hauge,

I just thought I’d drop you a few lines to thank you for your poems. We’ve put some of them in our play. I hope you don’t mind. I know a poem can be a very personal thing but, without wanting to seem rude; we didn’t want to tell your story. Only you could have done that, and perhaps you did, in all your words and spaces - we would only have been guessing - so we decided to tell a story of our own.

Some people I know have got together to make a piece of theatre about families. They can be tricky can’t they?

I don’t know about you, but there have been times when I would have happily slaughtered my family, buried them in shallow, unmarked graves and never given them another moment’s thought. I’m probably exaggerating, but then I used to be an actor, and an English one at that!

I hope you understand the spirit in which we have used your poems and that you can forgive us for being so self-serving. All I can say is that we’ve tried to use them directly and honestly - the way we experienced them. I believe this is the spirit in which you wrote them.

I wish you a very happy birthday and look forward to meeting you in the not-too-distant future.

Yours truly,
Andrew Wale"

Sources: BIT Teatergarasjen, autumn program 2008 and performance program. 10.08.2010: http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no -archive