Peer Gynt

Next week's junior play is Ibsen's Peer Gynt, adapted and directed by Dr Hudson, who here offers an introduction to the play, and explains some of the thinking behind his adaption.

The Norwegian poet and playwright Henrik Ibsen completed his great verse drama, Peer Gynt, in the summer of 1867. He may have been nearly forty but it’s clearly a work that reflects a young man’s fear of responsibility and it includes themes to which he would return in his famous domestic tragedies such as A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881) and Hedda Gabler (1890), especially concerning sins of the past returning to plague their inventors.
However, unlike those later naturalistic plays, Peer Gynt rejoices in absolute imaginative freedom – one minute, we are in a peasant cottage in a mid-19th century valley, the next we find ourselves among bizarre creatures of Norwegian folklore, such as mountain trolls or the Great Boyg, which represents some formless, impassable obstacle or mental state.

Because the play was conceived as a dramatic poem rather than for performance, it is both rooted in a recognisable familiar reality and at liberty to range wildly amidst the psychological turmoil of the title character.  This production is, therefore, no exception in having taken liberties with the text. Our version is based on a fairly literal 1892 translation (now out of copyright) by brothers Charles and William Archer and we have followed Ibsen in almost entirely disposing of Peer’s middle age, here seen briefly in flashback at the beginning of our second part. We have two Peers – an old and a young (a device borrowed from a 1980 production, adapted and directed by Antony Tuckey) – and we have taken the liberty of merging two major scenes from Ibsen’s play to form the closing scene of our first part.

While some recent productions have sought to bring Peer into the modern, British world, our aim is to suggest the original period and setting but relatively loosely, since the themes of the play are timeless and universal. Ibsen’s satirical digs at contemporary politics are, indeed, still disappointingly pertinent today and one of the play’s messages – that to be selfish is to be inhuman – must surely resonate as loudly in twenty-first century Britain as it will have done in nineteenth-century Norway; there is, after all, such a thing as society. ‘To thyself be enough’ is clearly the motto of the solipsist or Thatcherite egotist – the Emperor (or Empress) of Selfishness, in fact.

Another theme the play seems to promote, equally never out of fashion and embodied here in the character of Solveig, was perhaps rather more succinctly phrased by the poet, Philip Larkin, when he wrote that our ‘almost instinct’ can be proved ‘almost true:/ What will survive of us is love’.

Uncharacteristically, though, Ibsen may in this play be more optimistic, since it is certainly plausible to read the final moments of Peer Gynt as genuinely redemptive – love, here, seems truly to have survived.

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