Arne Legeri: “In our place”

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Triangle play

Little drama is sold and read in our time, but “In Our Time” by Lygre does not require much reading. We meet three women: Astrid and Sarah have just met. They shared chocolate on a bench, and within a few lines they became friends. Now Sarah rings the doorbell. Then Eva, an old friend of Astrid, appears. Eva has taken a break from her friendship with Astrid, and now she's making a comeback.

Sarah and Eva become rivals for Astrid's friendship, while the three of them form a kind of unstable triangle.

On the edge of this triangle of friends, outside the theater room, the rest of their lives unfold. The three women play roles as brother, father, or son to each other. Then one of the two women leaves the community, and the two remaining rivals choose to strike up a new friendship. Relationships change, but the idea of ​​friendships and their exploration remains.

Treatment room

The work is not exactly dramatic in the traditional sense of the word. It is a quiet exploration of the identity of the three women and their relationships with each other and with their families. But in Léger, family is examined through the prism of friendship. It is friendship that gives women the opportunity to experience the bonds and connections that have shaped their lives. By the fact that it is friends who slide into this text space the roles of family members in each other's lives, the experience of exploration is enhanced.

It's like a treatment room where no one charges.

Liberation is available!

Arne Lygre has succeeded in creating his own theatrical language. What we previously considered internal monologues are here woven together with lines in the play: Astrid, Sarah and Eva speak to each other with such honesty that we almost envy them. They say, at least on the surface, exactly what they think. Whether from each other or from children, siblings and parents. This is not realism. It is like a shared internal monologue, a shared sharing of the subtext of conversations.

But even though it is not realistic, we can recognize the conversations. These are the types of conversations we can experience between our best friends in a quiet session at the end of a good evening. Conversations in which we suddenly find that we dare to be skinless and brutally open with each other. The framework called friendship provides a space that family can never provide. Where the internal monologues we're forever grinding out get a safe space. The play is a tribute to the power of vulnerable friendship.

In this space we can see ourselves more easily, and we can change more easily. But only if we want to. It can also be a brutal space to venture into.

A language of its own

It is Lygre's distinctive theatrical language that lends itself to this. It is a language in which experience and thinking go hand in hand. As a reader, or audience, we are in some way let into not only the characters' lives, but our own lives as well.

The first friend to whom we must be open is ourselves.

It may be objected that Léger's form does not contain the dramatic arc or tension to which we are accustomed to in drama. In its basic form, it is more episodic and epic in structure. When you have finished reading the text, it is easy to imagine that it can continue, in the way that abstract conversations between friends never end, only hoping to resume at the next meeting. Either way, we remember those conversations, and allow them to change us. Lucky is the man who dares to have friends. And we're lucky that Arne Leger tells us that.

There will be no end?