Fumbled Lives Against a Bungled Background

For Line Knutzon, it is not about living up to outside expectations but finding yourself in the chaos, angst and emptiness of our times.  She exploits the dramatic potential of modern barrenness as a focal point for finding and refining one’s identity and lifestyle.

Shortly after her debut, she established herself as the voice of Generation X. Knutzon’s close connection to this new generation and her unmistakable language means that she reaches her audience like few others.  Through her language, absurd humour, vulgarities, and sudden poetry, she reveals an underlying, horrific reality – a reality into which the protagonists of Måvens og Peder [Måvens and Peder] (in a series of radio plays) are thrown with grotesque results.

Knutzon describes the family bankruptcies, oblivion and existential angst to be grown-up ‘on time’ of the generation of 1968.  For her, the concept of “grown-up” is “swindler’s trick.”

Current Productions

Guitaristerne / The Guitarists
(2005)
Singer and twelve-tone artist John Hansen is dead.  Those around him are in shock, and four fans decide to hold a memorial concert. Knutzon sets the stage for a bizarre encounter between ambition and amateurism, mixed with the idol’s legacy of songs that reflect a life full of contradictions, nonsense and disappointment. 

Snart kommer tiden / The Time Will Soon Come
(1998)
Tragicomic caricature comedy about the futility of relationships and the absurdity of family life.
A couple’s hopeless unsuitability for each other does not leave much opportunity to take care of their child, who has suddenly become much older than them.  And wiser.
 
Other productions
Den luft andre indånder [The Air Others Breathe] (2001)
Torben Toben [Torben Two-Legs] (2000)
Først bliver man jo født [First, You’re Born] (1994)
Det er så det nye [The Latest Thing] (1993)
De usynlige venner [Invisible Friends] (1992)

Reviews Extracts

”... one of the most joyous artistic quantum leaps of the 1990s is that Line Knutzon has achieved such distance to her material as a playwright, that she seems to be able to control her tools and, in the midst of her chaotic lifestyle satire, to insist on small poetic oases and carve monologues that hit true and deep on some important existential issues.”
Berlingske Tidende (DK)

International Collaboration
Snart kommer tiden, Új Szinhàz Theatre, Budapest 2005
Først bliver man jo født, Teater Vâsternorrland, Sundsval, Sweden 2005
Først bliver man jo født, Studio 42, New York 2004