Peer Gynt, from the National Theatre of Scotland and Dundee Rep, is a poetic ramble way off the beaten track. Before there were doll’s houses and slammed doors, there were the trolls, demons and bogeys of Ibsen’s nightmare tour through Norwegian folklore and the human psyche.
Peer is a compulsive dreamer, drinker, womaniser and liar. His fantasies are his escape from the miseries of rural poverty, but roaming through alternative worlds of his own creation he misses the crucial moments that might have made his real life liveable.
The vital presence at the heart of this sprawling story is Keith Fleming’s Young Peer – a poet among piss-artists, aflame with incorrigible imaginings, bright blue eyes brimming with devils. Full of boastful self-aggrandisement, whirling his hard-as-nails mother on a sleigh ride into the beyond, he’s an endearing, repellent, self-destructive and compellingly vulnerable figure. Ann Louise Ross is ferocious and soft-centred by turns as his determined, devoted survivor of a mum, while Cliff Burnett’s gaunt Button Man is a mutely sympathetic companion to Peer’s many and varied misadventures. And Robert Paterson and Carmen Pieraccini as King Bastard and the Green Woman, succeed in bringing their gloriously grotesque mythic personae onto the mean streets of contemporary Scotland.
Colin Teevan’s adaptation is both earthy and epic, but the play’s difficult fourth act remains troublesome, despite a rather terrifying musical coup. The wonderful ensemble perhaps do too thorough a job of establishing the community from which Peer flees in fury and disgrace, and we miss this note-perfect sense of locale, beautifully backed by Naomi Wilkinson’s unromantic design, when the action shifts in time and space to an un-named, ape-infested desert.
Peer Gynt isn’t an easy play. Nor – at a smidge over three hours – is it a short one. But Dominic Hill’s production is gutsy, inventive and stylish, finding a gripping, discomfiting immediacy in Ibsen’s perplexing tall-tale of a life squandered in pursuit of the wrong dreams.
Did you really like this? I found it impossible to make it something I could care about – it was like it was just so big the story itself lost its human heart (or goblin heart if you’d prefer).
I really, really did like it. I’m not saying there weren’t tedious bits (like most of act 4), but the comic-horror of the small-town setting really got me (it reminded me strongly of a couple of places – which shall remain nameless – where I did some growing up), and I loved the rootedness and swagger and self-confidence of the thing.
And I thought Keith Fleming was just stunning. It’s one of very few performances (along with Jonathan Cake’s Coriolanus at the Globe) where I actually missed a character when he wasn’t onstage.
But equally, I also really liked the production a couple of years ago from the National Theatre of Iceland – so maybe I just have a thing about trolls.
And you’re so very spot on about Cliff Burnett looking like a cross between Nick Cave and Colonel Sanders. An oddly comforting combination, somehow.