Peer Gynt E-Book

Henrik Ibsen

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 154

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. Peer Gynt, Ibsen's mighty epic, is by turns fantastic and tragic. Despite Peer's quest for absolute purity he repeatedly falls for the fleshy temptations of compromise, as he swaggers and seduces his way from the fjords of Norway to the deserts of Africa and back. Translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

PEER GYNT

by

Henrik Ibsen

translated by Kenneth McLeish

with an introduction by Stephen Mulrine

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Ibsen: Key Dates

Production Details

Characters

Pronunciation Guide

Peer Gynt

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

Henrik Ibsen was born on 20 March, 1828 in Skien, a small town to the south of Kristiania (now Oslo), the capital city of Norway, into a prosperous middle-class family. His mother, Marichen, took a lively interest in the arts, and Ibsen was introduced to the theatre at an early age. When he was six, however, his father’s business failed, and Ibsen’s childhood was spent in relative poverty, until he was forced to leave school and find employment as an apprentice pharmacist in Grimstad. In 1846, an affair with a housemaid ten years older than him produced an illegitimate son, whose upbringing Ibsen was compelled to pay for until the boy was in his teens, though he saw nothing of him. Ibsen’s family relationships in general were not happy, and after the age of twenty-two, he never saw either of his parents again, and kept in touch with them only through his sister Hedvig’s letters.

While still working as a pharmacist, Ibsen was studying for university, in pursuit of a vague ambition to become a doctor. He failed the entrance examination, however, and at the age of twenty, launched his literary career with the publication in 1850 of a verse play, Catiline, which sold a mere fifty copies, having already been rejected by the Danish Theatre in Kristiania. Drama in Norwegian was virtually non-existent at this time, and the low status of the language reflected Norway’s own position, as a province of Denmark, for most of the preceding five centuries. Kristiania, the capital, was one of Europe’s smallest, with fewer than 30,000 inhabitants, and communications were primitive.

However, change, as far as the theatre was concerned, was already under way, and Ibsen and his younger contemporary Bjørnson were among the prime movers. Another was the internationally famous violinist, Ole Bull, who founded a Norwegian-language theatre in his home town of Bergen, and invited Ibsen to become its first resident dramatist in 1851, with a commitment to write one play each year, to be premièred on January 2nd, the anniversary of the theatre’s founding.

During his time at Bergen, Ibsen wrote five plays, mainly historical in content: St. John’s Night, a comedy which he later disowned, loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Warrior’s Barrow, a reworking of a one-act verse play first staged in Kristiania; Lady Inger of Østråt, a five-act drama set in 16th-century Trondheim, on the theme of Norwegian independence; The Feast at Solhaug, which went on to be commercially published; and a romantic drama, Olaf Liljekrans, to complete his contractual obligations in Bergen.

Ibsen had meanwhile met his future wife, Suzannah Thoresen, and the offer of a post as artistic director of the newly-created Norwegian Theatre in Kristiania must have been very welcome. Ibsen took up his post in September 1857, and not the least of his responsibilities was to compete for audiences with the long-established Danish Theatre in Kristiania. A successful first season was accordingly crucial, and his own new play, The Vikings at Helgeland, set in 10th-century Norway, and based on material drawn from the Norse sagas, was an important contribution. By 1861, however, the Danish Theatre was clearly winning the battle, in part by extending its Norwegian repertoire, and Ibsen’s theatre was forced to close, in the summer of 1862.

Now unemployed, Ibsen successfully applied for a government grant to collect folk-tales in the Norwegian hinterland. During this period he also wrote Love’s Comedy, a verse play on the theme of modern marriage, and a five-act historical drama, The Pretenders, now regarded as his first major play, premièred at the Kristiania Theatre in January 1864, under Ibsen’s own direction. A few months later, financed by another government grant, Ibsen left Norway for Copenhagen on April 2nd, 1864, beginning a journey that would take him on to Rome, and international recognition.

Brand, the first fruit of Ibsen’s self-imposed exile, sees him abandoning historical themes, and drawing on his own experience more directly, basing his uncompromising hero on a fanatical priest who had led a religious revival in Ibsen’s home town of Skien in the 1850’s. Like all of Ibsen’s plays, Brand was published before it was staged, in March 1866, and received its first full performance almost twenty years later, in 1885 at the Nya Theatre in Stockholm, though it seems clear that like Peer Gynt, his next play, Brand was intended to be read, rather than acted.

Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt at Rome, Ischia and Sorrento, through the summer of 1867, using material from Asbjørnsen’s recently-published Norwegian Folk-Tales, as well as the darker corners of his own life, but the end result is regarded as containing some of his finest dramatic writing, with the irrepressible Peer at the other end of the moral spectrum from Brand, a typical example of Ibsen’s fondness for opposites or antitheses in his dramatic work.

The following spring, Ibsen left Rome for Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, to work on a new play, The League of Youth, which was premièred at the Kristiania Theatre in October 1869, and attracted some hostility for its satirical portrayal of contemporary politicians. A few weeks later, Ibsen travelled to Egypt, to represent his country at the official opening of the Suez Canal.

On his return, Ibsen began work on what he regarded as his greatest achievement, the mammoth ten-act Emperor and Galilean, dramatising the conflict between Christianity and paganism, through the life of Julian the Apostate. Published in Copenhagen in October 1873, to much critical acclaim, the play nonetheless had to wait over a century before it was staged in full, an eight-hour marathon in Oslo in 1987.

By this time, Ibsen’s fame had brought him tempting offers to return to Norway, as well as recognition at the highest level in the form of a knighthood, of the Order of St Olaf. However, apart from a brief sojourn in Kristiania in the summer of 1874, he remained in Germany, moving from Dresden to Munich the following year, to commence writing The Pillars of Society, completed in 1877, the first in a series of ‘social problem’ plays, although its large cast requirements make it nowadays something of a theatrical rarity. By contrast, his next play, A Doll’s House, has seldom been absent from the stage since its Copenhagen première in December 1879, and the challenge it offers to male hypocrisy and so-called ‘family values’ has ensured its continuing popularity.

In Ibsen’s characteristic manner, Ghosts in effect reverses the situation of A Doll’s House, showing the tragic consequences of a wife’s failure to break free from a disastrous marriage. Its exposure of taboo subjects like venereal disease, however, still retains the power to shock, and it was at first rejected by all Ibsen’s preferred theatres. After publication, almost two years elapsed before Ghosts was staged in Scandinavia, and the world première in fact took place in Chicago, in May 1882.

Ibsen was angered by his countrymen’s reception of Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People, with its ill-concealed attack on the Norwegian establishment, is to an extent a vehicle for that anger, as well as for Ibsen’s sceptical views on democracy. The play thus offended liberals and conservatives alike, but not enough to impede its staging, and it was premièred in Kristiania in January 1883, to mixed reviews.

The initial reaction to The Wild Duck, published in November of the following year, was largely one of bewilderment, although it was produced without delay in all the major Scandinavian venues. While the ‘original sin’ of the drama, the housemaid made pregnant by her master and married off to a convenient dupe, echoes that of Ghosts, Ibsen’s use of symbolism appeared to sit uneasily with the naturalistic dialogue, and indeed still troubles modern audiences.

However, Ibsen was moving away from the concerns of the ‘problem play’ towards a more personal, oblique utterance, and the controversy which dogged his work scarcely lessened with the publication of Rosmersholm, in November 1886. Especially noteworthy for the creation of Rebecca West, one of Ibsen’s most compelling characters, its witches’ brew of ingredients even included incest, and it caused a minor scandal.

Ibsen’s reputation was by now unassailable, however, and in Germany particularly, the innovative productions of the Saxe-Meiningen company had won him an eager following. In England, the enthusiasm of Edmund Gosse, and later William Archer, ensured that several of his plays were at least available in translation, but the first significant staging of his work in London had to wait until June 1889, with the Novelty Theatre production of A Doll’s House.

Meanwhile, The Lady From the Sea fared well enough at the box office, with simultaneous premières in Kristiania and Weimar, on 12 February, 1889, though again its complex amalgam of dreamy symbolism, evolutionary theory, and the daily routine of the Wangel household in northern Norway, tended to confuse audiences, and is still something of an obstacle to production.

Hedda Gabler, premièred in Munich at the Residenztheater in January 1891, is now Ibsen’s most popular play, but attracted fierce criticism in its day, largely on account of the character of Hedda herself. Arguably Ibsen’s finest creation, Hedda’s contempt for the sacred roles of wife and mother seemed the more offensive in that Ibsen provided no explanation for it, no inherited moral taint, and she continues to unnerve us even today, like a glimpse into the abyss.

In that same year, 1891, there were no fewer than five London productions of Ibsen plays, including Hedda Gabler, and the publication of George Bernard Shaw’s seminal critique, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, helped assure his place in the permanent English repertoire. Ibsen himself returned to Norway in July, a national hero, though he suffered the indignity of hearing his achievement disparaged by the rising young novelist Knut Hamsun, at a public lecture in October.

In his declining years, Ibsen increasingly sought the company of young female admirers, and his relationships with Emilie Bardach, Helene Raff, and finally Hildur Andersen, find their way into his later plays, notably The Master Builder, in which Ibsen also returns to the theme of self, which had inspired his early masterpieces, Brand and Peer Gynt. The burden of fame, the generational conflict between age and youth, Ibsen’s personal concerns, are explored in the relationship between the successful middle-aged architect Solness and the twenty-something ‘free spirit’ Hilde Wangel. Although the all-pervasive tower metaphor puzzled some critics, given that Freud had still to explain such things, the play was an instant success, going on from its première in Berlin in January 1893, to productions in Scandinavia, Paris, Chicago and London within the year.

Ibsen’s next play, Little Eyolf, despite having the distinction of a public reading in English, at the Haymarket Theatre in December 1893, even before it was published in Copenhagen, has enjoyed little success on the stage, where its mixed modes of realism and symbolism can fail to blend, with unintentionally comic results. However, John Gabriel Borkman, published three years later, and premièred in Helsinki in January 1897, achieves in prose the poetic grandeur of Brand. The play is drawn in part from Ibsen’s own experience of humiliating dependency, in the wake of his father’s financial ruin, and explores Ibsen’s cherished themes, the corrupting influence of materialism, personal freedom and self-doubt, and marital disharmony.

Ibsen was now permanently resident in Kristiania, venerated wherever he went, and his seventieth birthday, on 20 March, 1898, was the occasion for widespread rejoicing. His collected works were in preparation in both Denmark and Germany, and his international fame rivalled that of Tolstoy. It is fitting, therefore, that Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken, should have been premièred on 15 January, 1900, in effect launching the next century, at Kristiania’s new National Theatre, the confident expression of that Norwegian identity which Ibsen and Bjørnson, whose statues graced its entrance, did so much to promote.

Finally, like almost all of Ibsen’s plays, When We Dead Awaken is a response to the author’s psychic needs, part confession, part exorcism, and it can be argued that the ageing sculptor Rubek’s return to his first inspiration, Irene, now confined in a sanatorium, represents Ibsen’s feelings of guilt over his neglect of his wife Suzannah, and his belated acknowledgement that she had been the real sustaining force behind his work. The tone of When We Dead Awaken is accordingly elegiac, an appropriate coda to Ibsen’s long career. Two months later, in March 1900, he suffered the first of a series of strokes which was to lead to his death, in Kristiania, on 23 May, 1906.

Peer Gynt: What Happens in the Play

Ibsen intended Peer Gynt as a dramatic poem, for publication only, and in its original form it is virtually impossible to stage. Even in its performance version, created almost a decade later, and for which Grieg wrote the now famous incidental music, Peer Gynt presents a considerable challenge, not least because of its physical span of time and place.

As the play opens, Peer, a sturdy peasant lad of twenty, is spinning a yarn to his widowed mother Åse about his latest terrifying adventure, plunging into a lake on a reindeer’s back. Åse is at first alarmed, then realises it is simply another tall tale, and goes on to rebuke Peer for his lies and his idleness. But for these, she says, Peer might have married a wealthy farmer’s daughter, Ingrid, who is now about to marry his halfwitted rival, in the nearby village of Haegstad. Peer promptly resolves to pursue Ingrid, and sets off for Haegstad, first depositing Åse on the millhouse roof, to prevent her interfering.

On the way there, Peer is troubled by the poor opinion people have of him, and tries to boost his confidence by daydreaming about becoming Emperor. However, an encounter with the blacksmith Aslak, who beat Peer in a fist-fight some weeks before, lowers his spirits, and the fact that none of the wedding guests will speak to him, depresses him further. Even the shy young girl Solveig, who touches his heart with her self-evident goodness, is frightened off by Peer’s unsavoury reputation.

Meanwhile, the reluctant bride Ingrid has locked herself away from her feeble groom, and the latter naively enlists Peer’s aid to prise her out of her hiding-place. Peer, however, abducts Ingrid, and carries her off to the mountains, where he first seduces, then abandons her - declaring that his heart now belongs to Solveig, and none other.

To escape his pursuers, Peer goes up into the high mountains, where he encounters a mysterious Woman in Green, who turns out to be a troll, one of a race of supernatural creatures, able to change shape at will, but unable to breed, except through human beings, whom they constantly seek to seduce. Peer and the troll-woman discover a mutual attraction in their perverse outlook on reality, in which ugly is beautiful, and when she takes Peer to meet her father, the Old Man of the Mountains, they ride off on the back of a gigantic pig. At their palace, the trolls are on the point of killing Peer, when the Old Man offers to admit Peer to their ranks, provided he adopts their philosophy - a variation on ‘to thine own self be true’. Peer readily accepts, but refuses an operation that will permanently distort his vision, rousing the trolls to fury. Peer is told that his lustful thought alone has impregnated the Old Man’s daughter, who will bear his child, and he is finally saved from the trolls’ wrath by the sound of church bells, causing the palace and its fantastic occupants to disappear.

In pitch darkness, Peer’s onward path is then obstructed by a strange amorphous creature, the Great Bøyg, who urges Peer to ‘go round’, but engages him in a frustrating battle with himself, it seems, until the memory of Solveig saves him. When Peer awakens, he is mysteriously back at his mother’s hut, where Solveig is hiding. She will not see him, but Peer gives her sister Helga a silver button for Solveig, to keep as a token of remembrance.

Peer is an outlaw, and the villagers have taken revenge on his mother Åse, who has been left destitute. Peer meanwhile builds himself a refuge in the forest, and when Solveig comes to him he is overjoyed. Alas, his joy is shortlived. The Woman in Green, now old and wrinkled, with her ugly troll child, Peer’s son, suddenly arrives to reclaim him, and he is forced to flee, leaving Solveig once more behind him.

Finally, at the end of Part I, Peer visits Åse on her deathbed, and in a touching scene, spins her an elaborate yarn about her entry into Heaven, riding in a magical sleigh to St Peter’s castle. Åse dies contented, as Peer makes plans to abandon his native land.

Part II opens on the Moroccan coast, with Peer now middle-aged and extremely wealthy, having made a fortune from various disreputable enterprises, including slave-trading in Carolina. His declared aim is to become Emperor of the world, for which he needs even more money, but when he announces his intention to assist the Turks in their war against the Greeks, his companions steal his ship and desert him. Unhappily for them, his ship explodes at sea, and Peer sees this as an act of Providence.

Peer is then attacked by a troop of monkeys, but when a horse appears, as if in answer to his prayers, he rides off into the desert, and we find him next in an Arabian tent, camped by an oasis. There he is entertained by the sheikh’s daughter Anitra, but after a comical flirtation, during which Peer showers her with jewels, she steals his horse and rides off, leaving him stranded yet again. Meanwhile, at home in Norway, Solveig, now middle-aged, sings confidently of Peer’s ultimate return.

Peer’s African adventures continue in Egypt, with a visit to the Sphinx at Gizeh, which he likens to the mysterious Great Bøyg. However, a learned German doctor, Begriffenfeldt, emerges from behind the Sphinx and intrigued by Peer’s self-obsession, conducts him to the insane asylum at Cairo. Here Peer is introduced to a number of lunatics, objects of Ibsen’s satire, and is hailed as their leader and protector, the Emperor of Self.