Traum by Katarina Frostenson

Katarina Frostenson is my favourite Swedish poet. She has this great way of being non-romantic and very economical and precise with words, which I really like. I'm never for the ranting bed-of-roses-type of poetry, obviously.

When I was writing on my latest project I came across this play at the library and just by opening it I got the feeling that I shouldn't read it as it had too much to do with my own. Sometimes it's like that; you can't let yourself be disturbed by something that is similar to what you're writing. Especially not when it's been written by your favourite poet. At other times it can be very giving, of course, almost like nurturing, but at that time I was too scared of my own project as it was.

Reading it now, when I'm in the rewriting process of that play and after the brilliant lady at the Radio Theatre suggested that I read some of Katarina Frostenson's plays (oh, irony), I'm glad. It is a dialogue between a wife and her husband, a poetic recap of their whole life together. In a way. They seem to chase each other through the days, accusing the other for being unstoppable or ungraspable. Ranting, but with very compressed sentences, almost as if they'd left out 99 per cent of the words they had told each other over the years.

I wish someone would produce this play for theatre again.