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
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