Nussen Adapts Calvino's Meta-Novel for Edinburgh Fringe
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- Gregory Nussen has adapted Italo Calvino's 1979 novel 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' into a one-person show directed by Hannah Pilkes, running at Summerhall in Edinburgh through 31 August.
- The adaptation preserves the novel's postmodern surrealism and authorial intrusions, including the narrator character QFWFQ, and draws on improvisation influences like an overheard keyboard workout in a Helsinki church and Keith Jarrett's free-associating on The Köln Concert.
- Nussen frames their teenage summer-camp trip from America to Israel via Auschwitz as coercion, arguing it served both Holocaust remembrance and the promotion of 'perpetual threat and victimhood.'
- The show drops its self-referential tricks to rail against narratives with no place for Nussen as a queer artist or for the 700,000 Palestinians displaced in Israel's foundation.
- The performance concludes by calling 'unreliable narrators to account' when stories of others cannot be told with empathy and openness.
Why it matters: Nussen's adaptation treats Calvino's metafictional framework as a vehicle to interrogate their own American Jewish upbringing and to name 700,000 displaced Palestinians — pushing a mainstream Fringe audience into territory most theatrical adaptations of canonical literature avoid.
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