Name: Peer Gynt
Rating: 4 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9780887347504

Henrik Ibsen

William-Alan Landes

Peer Gynt

Tim Pendry

'Peer Gynt' (1867) will mean a great deal to Norwegians especially as a verse tragedy (its original form). It was also highly innovative in its 'cinematic' quality which outdoes Shakespeare in the rapdity of scene changes. However, I have always been more interested in content than form. In this respect, 'Peer Gynt' is less impressive - a quasi-social satire with sometimes Pythonesque qualities that tries to do what 'Brand' had done more seriously, that is, to present us with a theatre of ideas. Like 'Brand', the issue at stake is 'redemption' and justification by faith. To work outside its culture and country of origin, putting to one side the impressive music Grieg wrote for it, requires exceptional theatrical imagination, production and direction which would probably have to 'adapt' it rather than reproduce it 'authentically'. Peer Gynt is quite simply a different sort of narcissist to Brand (who had appeared triumphally the year before) and a narcissist (in my view) is going to reappear in 'The Doll's House'. Where Brand was 'heroic' to a degree, Gynt is, to be a blunt, a human weasel. The unlikeability of Gynt (amusing though he may be to contemporaries as the trickster-type) mostly just leaves a bad taste in the mouth. The ambiguous 'redemptive' ending (as unclear as that in 'Brand') reeks of 'mauvaise foi'. The creature is, to all intents and purposes, a sociopath. I suppose, in the Lutheran world of stuffy Oslo, it may be that Gynt allowed its audience to think that a bit of faith at the end of a life of sin might just get a man through the eye of a needle at the end of his life (or not - the ambiguity is there). A comforting thought perhaps (or not). As drama though, regardless of the 'ideology', it is interesting and innovative but it no longer has the impact it once had, not only because this sort of circus like approach to tale-telling has become normalised to the point of theatrical cliche but the issues are mostly no longer relevant today. Unlike 'Brand' where, even if God is dead, you can comprehend the torment of the misguided heroic idealist and universalise the dangerous power of absurd belief in abstract absolutes, there is nothing of interest in Gynt. He is a shit to the end. Solveig, a masochist, certainly deserved better! It is said that (as with Brand) Ibsen is playing with an image of himself - in the previous case as an 'all or nothing' absolutist and, perhaps, in the second as self-centred egoist. Neither, of course, is the man because neither type could present their own negative facets in this way. If so, there is a degree of psychoanalytic courage in both plays but, in both plays, Ibsen is looking at these facets in a peculiarly distanced and clinical way as if he was in the process of shedding parts of himself and enabling himself to move on to the realist and social observations of his later plays. I have concentrated here on content rather than form, fully recognising the importance of Ibsen's experimental modernism and unable to comment on the use of Dano-Norwegian verse forms which are a matter for academics. I can certainly conceive of a modern production that 'adapts' Peer Gynt 'cinematically' for our time. This would not be Ibsen as he was but could be true to the spirit of Ibsen as he might have expressed his 'facet' in today's world. I await that production with interest.

Marie

Skuespill. Peer Gynt og hans mor Åse lever i fattigslige kår. Men Peer er stolt og fortaper seg i skryt og dagdrøm. Til slutt må han rømme bygda. Under flukten møter han en rekke skikkelser. Ikke minst Den Grønnkledte, Dovregubbens datter og Solveig, som han er forelsket i. "Peer Gynt", som utkom første gang i 1867, er et oppgjør med nasjonalromantikken, men også en dyptloddende karakterstudie. Denne billigutgaven er utstyrt med etterord av Thomas Hylland Eriksen og en kronologisk oversikt over Henrik Ibsens (1828-1906) liv og virke.

Peer Gynt

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