Peter Gynt

In this radical new version of Peer Gynt, David Hare kidnaps Henrik Ibsen's most famous hero and runs away with him into the twenty-first century. Stripped of fretwork and greenery, the play is projected into a freewheeling modern world of music, dance, poetry, weddings, coronations, trolls and two-headed children as Peter steals a bride and embarks on an extraordinary lifetime's journey before returning home, finally, to Scotland. David Hare's Peter Gynt posits the same fundamental question the great Norwegian asked in 1867: does a belief in individualism help or hinder us in trying to live purposefully in the present day? The play opens at the National Theatre in July 2019 and transfers to the Festival Theatre Edinburgh, for the Edinburgh International Festival.

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian poet and playwright, was one of the shapers of modern theatre, who tempered naturalism with an understanding of social responsibility and individual psychology. His earliest major plays, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), were large-scale verse dramas, but with Pillars of the Community (1877) he began to explore contemporary issues. There followed A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881) and An Enemy of the People (1882). A richer understanding of the complexity of human impulses marks such later works as The Wild Duck (1885), Rosmersholm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), while the imminence of mortality overshadows his last great plays, John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).