A few words about the concept for the adaptation:

Roughly speaking, there are two different paradigms for adapting a novel for the stage. On
the one hand, there is the approach of retelling the novel on stage in such a way that it
always remains present for the audience that it is a novel; all actors tell the story together,
play all the characters in turn, each actor can take on any character. On the other hand,
there is the approach of transforming the novel as far as possible into a theatrical invention
and transforming the stories into playful situations as in a play; the actors are clearly
assigned to the characters, the whole range of dramatic and epic possibilities of the theatre
should be used as far as possible.

Two clear examples of these two different concepts are the adaptation of Orhan Pamuk's
SNOW by Ersan Mondtag at the Thalia Theater Hamburg in 2016 and our adaptation of
Göran Tunström's THE THIEF at Uppsala Stadsteater in 2008. We clearly follow the second
approach, the one of playfully translating a novel to the stage as a theatrical happening using
all the storytelling possibilities at hand, just as we did with THE THIEF. The novel
MORNINGSTAR is particularly well suited for this, as the novel itself already brings together
different levels between social realism and mystery play, description of the perception of
nature and reflexive insertions.

Accordingly, in our adaptation there are classical dialogue scenes as in a well-made play,
monologues, exchanges with the audience, choral interludes and voice-over texts. On top of
this is of course all the other storytelling means of theatre apart from text; choreographic
scenes, live music, and images created by set design, costume, light, and video, interplaying
with the text. The chronology of the adaptation follows the division of the novel into the two
days; DAY ONE and DAY TWO, and both are told in the present.

One of the most important points is the arsenal of characters. The novel follows the stories
of nine main characters, various secondary characters and has numerous brief appearances
by functionaries such as a policeman, stewardess, etc. - too large and unmanageable a
number of actors for the normal length theatre evening that we have been assigned. We
focus on six main characters: Kathrine, Jostein, Turid, Emil, Iselin, Egil. Through their stories
we also introduce Gaute, Mathilde, Ommundsen, Kenneth, the nameless cloud painter,
Farmor, the children Ole, Viktor and Emma and Frank as the final appearance. In addition,
small secondary characters and functionaries appear occasionally.

All in all, our aim is to tell the novel in all its fullness while condensing and focusing it. No
additional texts will be added, only the original material from the novel will be used. The city
of Bergen will be given special emphasis, as it is a special situation that the city in which the
novel is set is the same city in which its premiere takes place.

Armin Kerber

A few words about the concept for the set design and staging:
One of the dramaturgical movements in the book is a transition from the everyday world of
relations – parents and kids, lovers, employee and employer, friends and loneliness – to the
metaphysical. From the horizontal to the vertical. We want the set and playing ground for
our characters in some way to mirror this.
We start off by establishing a space we call “The living room of Bergen”. An open, semipublic
space, unassuming, trying to avoid portraying any specific part of the book or give the feeling
of a set design, instead a room maybe suitable for a talk show or a moderated discussion on
the stage of a city theatre, one like the actual stage of DNS. The room have blue walls,
continuing the color of the auditorium into the stage, diminishing the difference between
the two zones.

Here the actors greet the audience and thus establish some theatre conventions and
agreements for the evening. This space is well lit, without illusion and effects. Here the
difference between audience, actor and the portrayed characters is quite small. The
storytelling also starts with small means; an actor can sit on a chair and just say that she is
on an airplane seeing the city lights of Bergen below.

Then there is a slow transition going on, throughout the whole first part: the blue walls are
shifted to realistic “ready-mades”, small slices of everyday environment; like a bar, a door, a
kid’s room, that together with a more expressive light slowly creates more ambiance. Not
because we “have to”, since we already established a very simple and direct agreement with
the audience. But in order to slowly create a richer and more multilayered image, where
multiple characters and moods can inhabit the fragments of stage simultaneously.

Hallucinations and a creeping feeling of horror will enter the space from time to time, but
only temporarily and then return to the feeling of normality

The actual morning star, in the book perhaps an astrological phenomenon and to some
characters also a message from God, cannot be embodied only by light, since we already use
light, and thus more light would not make a real difference. Therefor it is a physical object; a
big circle, a huge round projection screen, coming down in front of the stage at certain
moments.

In the second act/day the room returns to its starting point, the blue room, but even more
austere and clean, a space where Egil can invite the audience to his inner world; where Jesus
and Nietzsche can slug it out and Egil can meditate upon faith and freedom, suddenly
disturbed by the reality of his son Victor.

And then, with Josteins journey to the land of the dead, the room disintegrates and opens
up to a mythological space, with fire, water, hallucinatory creatures, to finally culminate in a
very drunken meeting between Egil and Frank, the father who lost his young daughter Emma
in a car crash. Suddenly she is there, both see her, and this marks the beginning of
something new, a dissolving of the, in our time otherwise so strict, boundaries between the
living and the dead.

Linus Tunström