T he late playwright and writer Lars Norén was a household name in his native Sweden, and well known in the rest of Scandinavia and Continental Europe. The themes of his plays, only a few of which have been staged in English, reflect a lifelong fascination with outsiders – alcoholics, sex workers, criminals and the insane – but most are family dramas; characters talking past each other, hostile, unheard and misunderstood. Norén, who often directed or co-directed his own work, encouraged the actors to bare themselves onstage, and because the moments of confrontation in the dialogue were so sudden and maybe because people recognised something of their own emotional ambiguity in the text, audiences would often laugh. His collaborator Suzanne Osten noted the laughter and had the idea in the early 1980s of staging the plays like Woody Allen films, but there was always an undertone of bleak tragedy and existential loneliness in the scripts, alongside a profound sense of psychoanalytic doom.…