"Norén had too much integrity to be popular"

Striking drama.

That was the name of my C-thesis in literary science at the time it went.

I had seen Time is our home at Dramaten and was just struck by the people, the relationships, the trembling subtitles that can almost be touched on in Lars Norén's drama.

It is in that play that

a group of old schoolmates gather for a Chekhov summer fun, but regardless of the character gallery, the playwright Norén explores our longing, our dreams and what time does to us and our lives.

He began as a poet with an associative and never-ending flow of words.

With his dramatic debut with the autobiographical plays Night is the Mother of Today and Chaos is Neighbor with God in the 1980s, he began to explore the family and its destructive bonds, something that was spearheaded in the three bourgeois quartets, in which he portrays the family as claustrophobic. cell.

But he constantly

turned

to new contexts.

He became a voice for the weak with the six-hour-long play Personkrets 3: 1 at Elverket in Stockholm, which was preceded by a thorough research among people on the bottom of society.

No matter what world Lars Norén entered, he did so with a curiosity about man and his pain points.

He did not refuse to penetrate the dark, broken and ugly - he showed this not least when he went into the theater project 7: 3, in which three inmates with openly neo-Nazi views participated.

The tragic aftermath of the set obscured the sincere intention to investigate whether it is possible to make evil comprehensible and thus deal with it.

That words like Norénjul and Noréndrama

have penetrated into the Swedish language testifies that Lars Norén was an artist with whom most people had a relationship, but it is not possible to say that he became popular.

For that, he had too much integrity and perhaps also created too many enemies with the truth project he undertook with A Playwright's Diary.

Many may also have imagined his drama as inaccessible and too tragic.

Therefore, it is worth pointing out the humor that characterizes his plays throughout.

Lars Norén was an artist who understood that it is when we laugh the most we are the most open to the abysses in ourselves.

Lars Norén is dead, but his artistic work and timeless drama live on in immortality.