Skip to main content

Peter Gynt


National Theatre, London
Four stars

“I pity anyone without their own adjective” declaims the golf-club owning, gun-running, newspaper owning uber-capitalist and ego-stroking narcissist David Hare’s version of Ibsen’s self-aggrandising runaway boy becomes in Jonathan Kent’s production. A collaboration between the National Theatre of Great Britain and Edinburgh International Festival, where it arrives next month, Hare and Kent’s reimagining is a mind-expanding dream of a show, in which the doors and stairways of Richard Hudson’s set appear from thin air like a surrealist painting. James McArdle’s Peter, meanwhile, is an initially wide-eyed patter merchant returning to Dunoon from the war with stories as wide as the picture house screens from which he stole them.

Over the next three and a half hours, Peter moves mountains in his gradual getting of wisdom. At first he’s an unreconstructed roaring boy with ideas above his station, only to end the play a haunted bar-room philosopher in search of his long-lost mojo.   

Along the way, Peter’s life is a dream of dancing cowgirls, Bullingdon boy Trolls and a harem of Me Generation hippy chicks in search of a guru. While this is all brought to audacious life by a rollicking cast of twenty-five, there is lost love too, in the form of Anya Chalotra’s Sabine, who devotes her life to dispensing knowledge while Peter chases increasingly soul-sapping experience.

With McArdle onstage pretty much constantly, the young Peter has the infectious charm of a pantomime lead making all the audience his pals, while his older self is a bleak hangover from some spit-and-sawdust grimoire transplanted into a magical realist fantasia. After the initial fun, Hare’s targets – from super-rich con merchants to the fear of love, taking in fake news and personal myth-making en route - become increasingly explicit. One set-piece sees Peter forced to confront his multitude of divided selves in spectacular fashion.

With fine support from an ensemble that includes Ann Louise Ross as Peter’s much put-upon mother Agatha, lilting folksy airs by composer Paul Englishby and epic video projections  by Dick Straker, Hare’s Peter Gynt shows how much fame costs, and is as authentic a homecoming as any serial fabulist deserves.

Peter Gynt runs at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, August 1-10

ends

ends











Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more