Peer Gynt at the Guthrie's

As we drove along the Minnesota roads from Waconia this morning, we saw a wolf in a snowy field close to the road. -Is it really possible? I thought. In Norway there is panic whenever somebody has seen a wolf, and the farmers then go out from their houses with murder in their eyes and a shotgun in their hands.


Sure there was no wolf where we were going - or was it? Together with Barbara and Jarrett today I was at the matinee presenting Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt at the Guthrie's Teater. There was also a Post-Play Discussion this Sunday, which we attended after the end of the play. Barbara and Jarrett had got really good seats for us, so we had an excellent position watching the play.

More photos from the play

Peer Gynt – golden moments at the Guthrie's
By Øivind H. Solheim

On Sunday 17th February I had the pleasure to go to a matinee at the Guthrie's Teater, Minneapolis, watching the Norwegian giant Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt. The play is a completely new translation and adaption by the Minnesota poet of Norwegian stock, Robert Bly.

The start of the play was for me a totally new way of introducing the character and the action: Friends of the 50 year old Peer Gynt had prepared a surprise party for him, in the framework of our contemporary Minnesota/Norway reality. In the middle of this event we are flashed back to the play's original settings, the rural Norwegian society of the mid 1860-ies. The original play then could begin:
Mother Aase: Peer, you are a liar!
Peer: Who says!

Mark Rylance as Peer Gynt makes a wonderful appearance. In the opening scenes he displays Peer’s complex and yet simple character, the young boy who is kind of an outsider in the small rural community because of his background and his way of facing the challenges of life. His father was a drinker, and in order to compensate for what the boy did not get from his family, his mother Åse told him all kinds of fairy tales, and this was his kind of refuge and flight from the grey every day life. Mark Rylance shows through his interpretation how Peer is torn between the desire of being part of the community, and his desire to accomplish great deeds that will place him above his companions and lift him up to some kind of hero status. At one moment Peer has the strength to say “no” to the drinks offered by the other boys, but a few moments later it is too difficult to resist. He gets drunk and once again, he behaves like the others are used to seeing him. He betrays himself.

What I loved in this part of the play was Mark Rylance’s art of communicating to me the vulnerability of the young Peer Gynt. Peer in these scenes is a boy I can feel pity for and be fond of, hoping that his good sides will win over the bad ones (although I know what comes later in the play).

When we meet Peer again at the end of the play, Mark Rylance displays for us an old and disillusioned man who realizes that something has gone terribly wrong in his life: he has made the bad choices all over, and he has failed to be true to himself. For me watching Mark Rylance’s ageing Peer at the end of the play was a touching experience, especially when thinking of this character in the perspective of translator and adaptor Robert Bly and his Men’s movement. It is not suprising that Peer Gynt is of great interest to Robert Bly. For who is then Peer Gynt? A young boy – a Mother’s boy in Robert Bly’s terms – a boy having been neglected by his father throughout his childhood and teenage years, a man who misses the transition from being a boy to becoming a mature man and a father. In a television interview Robert Bly mentions this Mother’s boy aspect of Peer Gynt, and also referring to himself as having been a Mother’s boy. That close relation of Robert Bly to growing up with problems similar to those of Peer Gynt may certainly have been an important element in Robert Bly’s interest and motivation for translating and adapting Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. And I hurry to say: Thank you for that, because this relationship Peer Gynt – Robert Bly makes the masterpiece of Peer Gynt talk directly to our hearts today in this new translation and adoption.

Ibsen’s play has enough text in it for a six hour session on stage, and that volume is certainly one of the major challenges for any adaptor and producer who have the courage to bring Peer Gynt to the stage. In this perspective Robert Bly and the producer have made an outstanding work, carefully selecting scenes and dialogues, and thus cutting the play down to the more practical three hour format.

I felt the dialogue was easy to follow and that it went in an excellent pair with the visual presentation of the play. The play is originally, from Ibsen’s hand, all written as a poem with rhymes. Robert Bly was asked some twenty years ago to translate Peer Gynt for a New York theatre, and he had then translated the first part of it into a version without rhymes when the producer got financial problems and he had to stop. It is interesting – and also a great luck – that Robert Bly has chosen to make this new translation (the last parts of it, that he did not translate some 20 years ago) with rhymes. Bly’s rhymes give an additional value to the presentation of the play, often bringing the laughter forth in the audience. To me the rhymes all come naturally, they are an important and natural part of the play’s character.

In this new translation also the audience, as I experienced it, came pretty close to the play’s original character because of the Norwegian connections of translator Robert Bly. For me personally it was a very special moment when I heard actor Mark Rylance evocating Peer’s excitement and moment of reflection as he as an old man returns to Norway, leaning on the ship’s rail, looking landward, describes the Hallingskarv Mountain and the Folgefonn Glacier. Myself being from that part of Norway, and knowing of Robert Bly’s roots from that same area, this was for me a golden moment. Just like the rest of the play!

18 February 2008