Reading Guide to Shih-Wei Wang's I Am the Wind Jon Fosse's I Am the Wind: Hearing Ourselves in Silence

By Shuangshuang
Production Photos: Courtesy of Taipei Performing Arts Center
Editor: Huang Hsi
Proofreading: Huang Hsi

 

Editor's Note

Taipei Performing Arts Center's Blue Box is set to present I Am the Wind, directed by Shih-Wei Wang and performed by Morning Mo and Zi-Heng Lin. The production is based on Eg er vinden (I Am the Wind), the acclaimed 2007 play by Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The original work unfolds with remarkable austerity. Two figures drift aboard an imagined boat, endlessly approaching and leaving shore while circling through fragmented conversations, until one ultimately "lies down into the sea" and becomes the wind. With only the sparsest punctuation and stage directions, Fosse fills the text with hundreds of silences, pauses, and interruptions, embodying the theatrical principle for which the Nobel Committee praised him as one who "gave voice to the unsayable."

How this production will evoke Fosse's distinctly musical rhythm–at once absurd, solitary, and profoundly lyrical–through sound, movement, and theatrical space promises to be one of this year's most anticipated performances.

Ahead of the premiere, Filmaholic invited critic Shuangshuang to offer a reading of I Am the Wind, focusing on the meticulous orchestration of silence within Fosse's text, and on the possibility that the play is, perhaps, the interior monologue of a single consciousness, revealing a landscape that belongs to each of us alone in private.

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Reading Guide

I Am the Wind will be presented at the Blue Box of Taipei Performing Arts Center, directed by Wang Shih-Wei and performed by Morning Mo and Zi-Heng Lin. The playwright, Jon Fosse (b. 1959), is a Norwegian author who writes in Nynorsk. He was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature for his body of work, which the Nobel Committee recognized for its ability to “give voice to the unsayable.”

For me, reading I Am the Wind (Eg er vinden, 2007) feels like boarding a train onto an unfamiliar route. Although Fosse has long been internationally acclaimed as one of the most frequently performed living playwrights, his works remain relatively underrepresented in Chinese translation. Early efforts to introduce his theatre to Chinese readers were largely attributed to Zou Lulu of the Shanghai Theatre Academy. In 2014, Someone Is Going to Come: Selected Plays of Jon Fosse introduced five of his works, followed by Autumn Dream: Selected Plays of Jon Fosse in 2016, which collected another four.

At present, our university library does not hold these collections; the only available work is the Simplified Chinese edition of his novel Trilogy (Trilogien, 2014). Traditional Chinese translations arrived much later, beginning with A Shining (Kvitleik, 2023), published in 2025, followed by Morning and Evening (Morgon og kveld, 2000), which was released in May 2026.

A play such as I Am the Wind may naturally bring to mind Existentialism. In existentialist theatre, the first works that come to mind are perhaps Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (Huis Clos, 1944), with its famous phrase “Hell is other people,” or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), whose author remains one of the playwrights most frequently compared with Fosse.

For now, let us set “Existentialism” aside. After all, we are uncertain of what awaits ahead on this Terra Incognita. The desire to know the unknown is what we call suspense.

The premise of I Am the Wind is remarkably simple: one person (The One) and another person (The Other) are aboard a boat. In both Simon Stephens’ English translation and Alan Tang’s Chinese translation, the two figures are referred to as “he”; this essay follows the Chinese translation. They sail, they come ashore, they depart again, and eventually one of them “lies down into the sea.” The play concludes with his final words:

“Now I am gone.
I am gone with the wind.
I am the wind.”

Hong Kong playwright Yan Pak-to, in his commentary on I Am the Wind, observes:

“The general perception is that Fosse does not adopt traditional realist techniques in his writing. Yet in this exchange, we can see that Fosse is, in fact, highly skilled at creating suspense, which is a classic technique of dramatic writing.”

The “exchange” he refers to appears at the very beginning of the play:

The One:
I did not want to then.
I just did it.

The Other:
You just did it.

The One:
Yes.

(A brief silence.)

What does “I just did it” actually mean? This suspense is precisely what we seek to explore. I will describe a certain kind of “experience”: that of looking out a window at unfamiliar landscapes, continuously imagining and speculating as they pass by, while contemplating a destination that remains suspended and unresolved. But before turning our attention back to suspense, let us set it aside and focus rather on silence.

The text contains very little punctuation, makes extensive use of line breaks, and offers few stage directions for physical actions. What it contains in abundance, however, is silence. The entire play is fewer than 70 pages long, with approximately 440 stage directions. Among them, “silence” reappears more than 110 times; “pause,” 250 times, and “interruption” nearly 30 times. It resembles the view outside a moving train: fragments of scenery appearing one after another, then disappearing into a tunnel; darkness, scenery, darkness, scenery… a darkness like silence, like moments when the text portrays no scenery at all.

“In fiction, you must constantly use words,” Fosse once said. “In theatre, you can make use of pauses, interruptions, and silence. What is left unsaid is precisely what I wish to say.” Yet, intriguingly, when reading a play, “silence” is not truly silent. It remains, ultimately, part of the text: not only something to be “read” by the reader, but also something deliberately “written” by the author.

The scripts of And We Will Never Be Apart (Og aldri skal vi skiljast, 1994) and Shadows (Skuggar, 2006) particularly demonstrate this point. The dialogue and stage directions are distinguished solely through differences in typography, rather than through the use of parentheses. In other words, for the author, both are equal forms of text. Or, seen from another perspective, Fosse painstakingly marks “silence” again and again, just as painstakingly as he writes and rewrites the spoken words of his characters. He arranges silence with the same precision with which he shapes language itself.

Seen in this way, silence is not the opposite of text; it exists as part of the text itself. Together with language, it forms a rhythm, functioning as a “musical motif” and a motive that gives shape and purpose to what unfolds. Darkness and blank spaces are not merely pauses or interruptions. They exist as part of the landscape, always moving toward a destination, toward the moment of sudden recognition when the suspense is finally resolved. Now, let us bring “suspense” back and place it upon our laps. In what follows, I will attempt to describe the two forms that this suspense takes.

"I didn't mean to / I simply did." But what was it that was done?

A conversation unfolds—or perhaps circles endlessly—between one person and another, with silence woven between their words:

One:

I'm gone.
I'm gone with the wind.

The Other:

You're gone.

One:

I'm gone.

(A brief silence.)

And then I no longer exist.

(Pause.)

The Other:

You no longer exist.

One:

That's right. I no longer exist.

(A brief silence.)

Nearly half a page passes. The landscape remains remarkably plain, almost monotonous: seven short sentences, seven declarations of absence. Yet here lies the paradox. The speaker is clearly present, and yet insists, "I'm gone." By the end of the play, when the speaker is, in every apparent sense, truly gone, they nevertheless remain present, even if only through speech. 

Whether they are still physically present is left unresolved; Fosse's stage directions offer no answer.

One:

I'm gone.

The Other:

So that's what you did.

One:

That's what I did.

The Other:

And that's what you did.

Mm.

Mm, because—

(Pause.)

One:

I'm gone.
I'm gone with the wind.

The Other:

Now you're gone.

One:

Now I'm gone.
I'm gone with the wind.
I am the wind.

If we follow the framework of existentialism, the fragmented and wandering dialogue can easily be traced into a familiar philosophical trajectory along with the character’s reflections:

“When people try to describe things,
they complete it by saying something else.”

and:

“There is nowhere to stay,
but people still have to—
hmm—stay somewhere.
But I cannot endure those sounds,
the sounds of other people,
the sounds of everything that is happening.”

Yet:

“If I were alone,
if I only—
listened to myself…
then there would be nothing there,
and I would become heavy.”

The path seems clear: the self exists and attempts to speak, yet language constantly fails to express what it intends fully, nor can it truly reach another person. The other becomes, as Sartre famously described, “hell”—and yet this very hell remains the only possible condition through which the self can exist.

All of the above assumes that their exchange is a dialogue. But what if we read it not as a conversation, but as the inner monologue of a single person? At the beginning of the text, the playwright notes: “I Am the Wind takes place on an imaginary boat, one that may not even suggest a boat at all. All movements exist within the realm of imagination; they do not necessarily need to be physically performed, but should instead evoke thought in the audience.” If so, perhaps two people are not needed on stage. The sentences have already become fragments; astray from the nature of dialogue.

The most complete passage of speech occurs after one person has departed, when the other delivers a monologue lasting two pages. He describes himself on the boat and the other person in the sea in meticulous detail, almost like stage directions, yet everything is conveyed through words and speech. In the English translation, this section is rendered in the past tense. Afterwards, the first person returns through the line “I’m gone,” becoming present once again, while the other person’s monologue and dialogue shift back into the present tense.

To whom is this speech—both a recollection and a moment unfolding in real time—addressed? Perhaps this is a choice left to the director: is the character speaking to himself, or to the audience? Yet, for me as a reader of the script, the inconsistency of tense further suggests that, from beginning to end, this may have always been one person’s monologue spoken between the self and another self. A monologue has no tense. Within imagination, the boundary between life and death is merely a low wall that can be effortlessly crossed. Thus, the first statement from One is: “I’m gone. I’m gone with the wind.”

And at the end, it returns: “Now I’m gone. I’m gone with the wind. I am the wind.” His absence has remained constant from beginning to end. Therefore, when he says, “I didn’t mean to / I simply did,” perhaps what he means is that, at that moment, he left the other person behind and lay down in the sea. That was all. That was simply what happened.

It has happened from the very beginning, where One has already been an imagined ghost—wandering, departing ahead of time, and existing forever. One becomes the other person’s melancholy: a loss that cannot be accepted, a departure that cannot be acknowledged.

One becomes the wind, and the wind is as paradoxical as a ghost:

“As long as the wind continues to blow, the departure has not yet been completed. Yet when the wind falls silent, it marks both the completion of departure and its ending. Thus, departure returns once again to the state of ‘what is to come.’”

And so, there is never a final farewell.

At this moment, looking out the window, one suddenly realizes that the landscape outside is the very place where the journey began: the circular railway. Whether it is a dialogue between One and the Other, or the Other’s monologue, both are imagined conversations—conversations that never arrive anywhere. Borrowing Jacques Lacan’s (1901–1981) concept, these are forms of empty speech (parole vide): the speech exchanged between the subject’s “imaginary self” and the “imaginary Other,” in which nothing of true significance takes place. Full speech (parole pleine), by contrast, emerges between the subject and the silent Other; or, more precisely, within the silence of the Other.

Those moments of “silence,” “pauses,” and “interruptions”—the incomplete fulfillment of language—are precisely the usefulness of nothingness within the text. Through the intensity of the written word, they constantly remind us that there are languages beyond language, stories beyond stories, and landscapes beyond landscapes. From this, one cannot help but wonder: When the train window turns black, what landscape do I see?

It was myself.

My face reflected on the black glass; and on my lap rested the lingering thought of myself—the “lingering thought” here close in meaning to remembrance, longing, attachment, and nostalgia.

What follows is entirely an experience: mine. Through association, this lingering thought finds an open-ended resolution.

When I put down the script and prepared to sleep, I suddenly found a resemblance of the two characters in the play. One of them is named Fang Si-Chi:“a person who died in ground zero.” Gone. Broken. It simply happened. The other is Liu Yiting: remaining on the boat, reading the diary left behind by Si-Chi. (Characters from Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise.) Or perhaps they recall Han Kang’s Human Acts (소년이 온다, 2014) and We Do Not Part (작별하지 않는다, 2021)—one person, those people, are dead. And another person, we, remain alive. To stay alive is inevitably to carry the weight of the dead, and to never say goodbye.

When One declares, “I am the wind,” he becomes a wall of concrete shattered into fragments, a stone sinking downward, heavy and silent—“a heaviness so delicately turned that it becomes unspeakable,” beyond expression. Like a stone, we cannot enter into the realm of the dead; yet the dead continues to “participate” in our lives. Like the wind, we listen. The wind carries with it traces of warmth and vibration, carrying the unfinished wishes and lingering thoughts of those who are gone. Through the text and within its words. the silences, the absences, the emptiness of the ten thousand openings, it continues to move, whistling and resounding.

Objective words and landscapes are received by readers and passengers in largely similar ways. Yet when words and landscapes themselves seem to disappear, the inner landscape emerges. Through the darkness of the tunnel and the frame of the train window, the black glass becomes a mirror of the imagination—an ideoscope—shifting the focus of our vision so that we may finally see that singular, utterly personal face and thought. Perhaps the way to “give voice to the unsayable” is silence: within it, we hear ourselves.

Where there is no place for speech to occur, speech itself emerges.

The above is merely one reading—and only one reading. The simplicity of I Am the Wind resembles a seal stone: once it is interpreted and transformed into theatre, every director and every performer involved will leave behind their own imprint, pressing their uniquenesss onto the work. From these marks emerge landscapes that can never be imagined, through reading alone.

 

2026 Taipei Arts Festival: Wang Shih-Wei’s I Am the Wind

Date: 18–20 September 2026
Venue: Taipei Performing Arts Center — Blue Box
Tickets: Available via OPENTIX: https://tpacplayer.org/3hxrT

“Under some extreme circumstances, language fails. Only silence can convey the trembling of the soul.” This is a belief that Fosse has consistently held.

After completing I Am the Wind (Eg er vinden) in 2007, Fosse stepped away from playwriting due to physical and emotional exhaustion brought on by years of intensive writing. More than a decade later, he returned to theatre with a renewed poetic precision. Structurally, I Am the Wind departs almost entirely from the conventions of traditional drama: there is no backstory, no explicit conflict, no clear motivation, and even the characters’ social identities are stripped away.

For Fosse, the musicality of words, the force of silence, and the weight of pauses are far more significant than plot or character development. His work explores waiting—the painful state of being suspended between reality and desire, searching for a resolution that may never arrive. Within an immense emptiness where almost nothing exists, “pauses” and “silence” become monumental. Fosse invites us to hear this silence and to see this absence. Within this blank space—both ecstatic and terrifying—he repeatedly examines the boundaries between life and death, solitude and the divine.

Director Wang Shih-Wei’s creative philosophy of “putting down the map and returning to the text” resonates deeply with Fosse’s pursuit of breaking free from the constraints of meaning and reaching what he describes as the “absolute intensity of pure sensation.”

Today, we find ourselves in an era overflowing with words, yet one in which language is increasingly losing its ability to communicate. “Silence” may initially leave us disoriented, but it can also open a profound encounter: the question of how to confront the weight of existence emerges before us with an urgency that cannot be avoided.

Nearly two decades after its premiere, I Am the Wind continues to hold enduring contemporary relevance. Through collaboration with artists across disciplines, Wang reimagines the relationship between theatre, spectatorship, and perception, inviting audiences not only to understand a story, but to enter a sensory experience in which the body and time become deeply intertwined.