No emperor: Peter Gynt at the NT
Peter Gynt
National Theatre
Olivier Theatre
Stalls D59, £29
1 July 2019
NT page
Jonathan Kent’s previous Ibsen adaptation in the Olivier, 2011’s Emperor and Galilean with Andrew Scott, was so much a formative theatre experience for me, was something I so enjoyed and think about often still, that when booking for Peter Gynt opened I didn’t hesitate to spend more than I usually would do on a good seat at the earliest opportunity. My savvier friends, of course, have mocked me since, and even at my most enthusiastic I couldn’t ignore the serried ranks of empty seats, no doubt inevitable from any attempt to mount Ibsen’s play, nuttiest of the nutties.
Such a weight of expectation is not a fair way to go into any production, and I worry even now that I am too harsh, or too kind. Nevertheless, I think my judgement can be expressed concisely as ‘largely unsuccessful’ – still interesting, still worth seeing if you love Ibsen (not if you don’t) and a proud possessor of one stunning moment. But by no means a repeat of Emperor’s brilliance, which, to be fair, was a tall order.
I’ve never seen a successful production of Peer Gynt, so perhaps the core of the problem lies with the play. But given you could argue the same about the extremely strange Emperor and Galilean, let’s put that to one side and say the core of this particular lack of success probably lies with David Hare’s adaptation. I can’t claim to love Hare’s work but nor can I deny – that word again – his success. So what’s happened here?
There were a handful of things about Hare’s adaptation that I particularly disliked, chief among which were a profligacy of cheap and dated jokes. Someone should have told Hare that it is no longer current to refer to Fifty Shades of Grey, and that therefore the reference is no longer apt as an easy gag. There were many such things, no doubt intended to approach Ibsen’s weird folky satire thing but here depressingly cloth-eared, like a politician getting down with the kids. The text waddles along, neither serious nor funny, neither ambitious nor casual, never beautiful, almost never entertaining.
With such a starting point, it’s not surprising a lot of other things fall flat; or perhaps I should say, given this is what got through rehearsals, the team as a whole seem to be going for something I neither get nor recognise; or perhaps again I should say, there needed a stronger vision to cohere what is good and force out what is weak. As it is, Peter Gynt is hit and miss, largely miss, despite the charismatic, tireless efforts of James McArdle in the title role.
Let’s talk about that one great moment, when Kent does what I’d hoped he’d be doing all along and accepts the gauntlet of Ibsen’s outrageous disregard for the theatrically possible. The madhouse scene at the end of Act IV has been the nadir of previous productions I have seen, but here Kent and Hare cast all the inmates as versions of Gynt himself, straightforward representations of his outrageous egoism but executed brilliantly and threateningly, as the boundaries of the madhouse are exploded and to reveal an endless nightmare sea of mad Gynts yacking and pushing and horrifyingly needing, recalling images of North Korea, of Trump, a satire on the relentless clamour of our present day from all walks of life and the endless shout of ‘me’. Theatrically impressive, painfully relevant, this is what I came for. If only this had been the norm and not the exception.
No comments yet.