Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem

Peer Gynt would be a most unusual play to be written by any playwright but especially by arch-realist Henrik Ibsen. The play was first published in 1867 and premiered some time after that. (No date is indicated in Wikipedia, but Edvard Grieg wrote incidental music for it in 1875.) The first American presentation was in 1907. The play has attracted some of our best actors -Laurence Olivier played The Buttonmolder to Ralph Richardson's Gynt, and in the premiere of this version, Mildred Dunnock was Aase and John Garfield Gynt. Ingmar Bergman staged a long version of the play in 1957 with Max von Sydow as Gynt. Christopher Plummer played Gynt in an augmented concert version of the play presented in 1993. Loosely based on the Norwegian folk tale, Per Gynt, Ibsen's play tells the story of a self-centered layabout who lies whenever he opens his mouth, seduces every woman he can and then leaves them, and thinks only of his own immediate comfort. The play moves in and out of realism to fantasy, and must have been close to impossible to stage when it was written, with its troll king and troll princess at one moment beautiful and the next sporting a pig's snout for a nose and pig's legs beneath her skirts, and its talking balls of yarn, withered leaves, dew drops and straws, not to mention that there is a fantasy scene in an insane asylum where the inmates crown Gynt emperor and one man hangs himself and another slits his throat because he thinks he's a pen and needs to sharpen the pen's nib. In the end, Gynt is caught by his nemesis, a mysterious and frightening character called the Buttonmolder: the Buttonmolder melts down the souls and bodies of failed humans and uses the dross to form new people. You won't be tortured in Hell, the Buttonmolder tells Gynt, "That's reserved for sinners with a conscience." Soon after, he consoles Gynt by telling him, "You are not good enough for heaven and not bad enough for hell. You've got to be melted down. ... After all, you have never existed." Gynt is saved in the end, by the woman he seduced as a young man in his home village. She has nurtured a pure and enduring love for him and the flames of that love warm his heart and drive away the Buttonmolder. I can't claim I like all of the play. The (Christian) symbolism in some scenes is laid on too heavily for my own taste. But the play is intriguing and as a whole, it coheres. It would be an actor's delight to act in this play, especially as Gynt or the Buttonmolder, a composer's dream to compose music for it, and a director's nightmare (but what a challenge) to stage.

Peer Gynt is a piece of literature that, like Goethe's Faust Part II plays best on the stage of the imagination. It is too lengthy and costly to be performed on stage. Sometimes the first three acts are performed together, sometimes the last two acts are brought together to become a whole for a theatre production. In terms of reading, this is a great fable piece. Peer is the Trickster with the mirror to his conscience. As a youth, he is Troll-like in his lusts, in his carousing. In his middle-age, he is Troll-like in his financial enterprises. At the end of his life, he is a folorn man, having given up possible true love to run around in search of his self. He is a fraud but we feel sympathy for him. He pursues life in search of distractions and power but ends up empty at the end, soon to be the vicim of the Button Moulder, soon to be nothing more than a button. This work has many levels and open to numerous interpretations. Ideally, this is the book you read for a book club. There is nothing conventional about it. The conversations will be endless and the philosophy inspired, well, might be inspiring.

This is the first version of the play. Beautiful writing, incredible fluidity of speech. A must have between Peter Pan and Samuel Beckett.

Often funny. Often bizarre. Always deep. Peer Gynt first appears to me as this self-centered youth who cares only for himself and the satisfaction of his impulses and whims at any cost. He is the quick non-thinker, who leaves a life of relative conventionality to roam as a dissolute wanderer. He is indeed all of these things, but all the while his "self" is not "centered". At the end of his adventures as a libertine, the grey-bearded Peer Gynt is at a cross-roads, and he asks the character of the Button Moulder this question: "What, after all, is this being one's self?" The Button Moulder replies that being one's self means slaying one's Self, and furthermore "observing the Master's intentions in all things." Peer Gynt contemplates this... restraint and delayed gratification have never been manageable themes with him. In my opinion, this whole idea of the search for the "self" is what Peer Gynt is all about. At the very final crossroads he is redeemed by the undeserved forgiveness and love of Solvieg, the woman he has once abandoned... this scene being a beautiful picture of the grace and love of God that is available to the Peer Gynt in every reader.Ibsen originally wrote Peer Gynt as a poem, and therefore we lose the Norwegian rhyme and metre in any English translation. To compensate if at all possible, I suggest reading the play while listening to the incidental music of Edvard Grieg, specifically composed to accompany the live performance of Peer Gynt. (Note: My review is based on the translation by Peter Watts).

This ranks up there with Shakespeare. That is all you need to know