The Man Who Lost Time

Stage adaptation written by: Kovács Krisztina and Róbert Júlia

a musical tragicomedy with hellish twists and turns

The Man Who Lost Time is an unpublished novel by Jonas Petter Aronsen, which exists in several versions, but only in manuscript, in an unedited form.
Although a Norwegian literary magazine published details of it from the beginning of the 2000s, few people are familiar with this captivating text stream of almost a thousand pages, which the author wrote under the inspiration of Chekhov's Platonov.

Aronsen himself states that his writing is a strange mixture of psychorealism, magical absurdity and poetic thriller, and he apologizes to his future readers in advance, because his novel contains many contradictions, unexpected twists, abandoned storylines and forgotten characters. And if all that weren't enough, the reader has to wade through a lot of footnotes before the tangled love story at the heart of the novel unfolds.

Nevertheless, this strange work is irresistibly exciting and extremely entertaining, which was noticed by a teacher of Hungarian origin living in Norway, who sent a copy of the manuscript to Hungary as well.

The Vígszínház in Budapest is the first in the world to produce a stage adaptation of Aronsen's novel, directed by Viktor Bodó. The premiere will take place in December 2024. The Hungarian stage version is written by Krisztina Kovács and Júlia Róbert.

Jonas Petter Aronsen was born in 1972 in Bergen. In his youth, he trained to be a meteorologist, then he realized that he would rather be a writer, so he abandoned his studies.
When he was still young, he saw a performance of Chekhov at the National Theater in Oslo, which touched him so much that he began to study the author more deeply.
Inspired by Chekhov, he began to write his novel The Man Who Lost Time, of which he made many versions, but never actually finished it. Among other things not, because he got mentally involved in writing...

Duration of the production: 4 perc.