This year’s graduation production for the third year acting students as well as the entertainment technology, performing arts management and performance design students is a knock out.

John Bolton’s production of Peer Gynt, the first full-scale production that I can remember in Wellington, if not New Zealand, blows away any cobwebs you may feel cling to Ibsen’s seemingly intractable dramatic poem that, like Hardy’s The Dynasts, appears to have been written to be seen inside a reader’s head rather than on a stage.

Using a cheeky, freewheeling, colloquial translation by Kenneth McLeish of this sprawling epic of the life of the irrepressible Peer, John Bolton and his cast of fifteen give the play an energy both physical and vocal that sweeps one along almost to the point of letting one forget the fact that at 3 and a quarter hours it goes on too long.

While the German director Peter Stein directed a version of the play with six actors playing Peer and a recent British version used three actors (two black and one white), Bolton uses all fifteen actors to play Peer. It is a device that works well and is not at all confusing because whoever wears a red beanie is Peer.

At the beginning all 15 are wearing red beanies, and in the following scene Peer’s mother deals with two sons at once. With 15 Peers the force of Ibsen’s point about his insatiable egotism and selfishness becomes an indictment of all of us in the modern world.

There are some drawbacks in the production, however. Peer never ages and some of the more emotional, reflective scenes get lost in the exuberant production and highly physical performances. The famous scene when Peer, peeling an onion, realizes his spiritual desolation fails to register through no fault of the actor playing Peer. And the Norway of fjords, mountains and forests is only rarely suggested though the trolls are wonderfully comic, cartoonish and updated Bosch-like creatures. The romanticism of Grieg’s music, by the way, is used only briefly and then ironically.

But the production with its two moveable framework houses that become in a twinkling a house, a church, a ship, a madhouse and a mountain-top is superb and the scenes in which Peer, the capitalist adventurer seeking yet more wealth, take place in the huge Te Whaea foyer as the audience stand about drinking coffee and wine after the interval.

There really aren’t any weak performances at all. While teamwork is to the fore I must mention, however, Bree Peters’ lively Anitra, Allan Henry’s delightfully enigmatic and dour Statue and his haunting Button Moulder, Gareth Williams’s scary director of the lunatic asylum, and Miriama Ketu’s touching, beautiful, heartfelt performance as Peer’s true-love, if he only but realized, Solveig.

We are indeed fortunate to have had such a splendid production of a modern classic that no professional theatre in this country would even contemplate doing. All in all, a triumph and any serious theatregoer would be a fool to miss.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

When did you last see a cast of 15 professional actors perform a classical satirical epic of Homeric proportions with a production, administration and mentor crew of 24 behind them?

This rare opportunity comes with the Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School graduation production of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which sets highly trained acting, design, technology and management graduates of bachelor and diploma courses, off on a wide range of career-paths. And when it is directed by John Bolton, Australasia’s pre-eminent teacher of physical theatre, it’s an opportunity not to be missed.

Still seen as an early play in his lexicon, Peer Gynt (1867) exposes the anti-hero that lurks within every testosterone-driven young man in flight from mediocrity and in quest of fame and fortune. [It was written 17 years after his first crude attempt (Catalina, 1850) and followed his bleak The Vikings of Helgeland (1857, discussed in my recent review of Hone Kouka’s Nga Tangata Toa), his satirical Love’s Comedy (1862) and poetical ethics epic Brand (1865).]

Desperate for heroic adventure, Peer drives his ever-loving but destitute widowed mother Ase to distraction, gets into fights at a wedding party, falls in love with Solveig – pure of singing voice and soul – gets drunk, then, smarting at Solveig’s recoiling from him, abducts the reluctant bride, Ingrid, only to abandon her on a mountain top. And this only brings us to scene 4 of 38 as per the Kenneth McLeish translation, used by England’s National Theatre for their 1990 production (which ran 15 minutes longer than this one’s 3 hours, including interval).

Rich in symbolism and allegory, the play articulates behaviours, belief systems and metaphysical concepts yet to be formalised in the social sciences, and even adds a touch of what we now call post-modern deconstruction. Peer’s wide-ranging quest for ‘Self’ is dedicated to proving himself worthy of Solveig who does love him after all and, like a virtuous Christian maiden or new age hippy idealist – take your pick – will waste her own life in solitary bliss, awaiting his return.

Meanwhile, driven by self-serving desires of the flesh, exhibiting the classic paranoid delusions of grandeur and persecution, of self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, Peer embarks on a psycho-emotional journey that equates with many a contemporary young person’s often drug-fuelled experiences in exotic climes as they avoid and/or seek their centre of equilibrium.

Thus, in Part One, Peer romps with herd girls, dwells with grotesque Trolls, escapes their distorting demand for conformity, encounters the amorphous Bøyg, who tells him to take the long way round when he’d rather have instant gratification … He returns to Solveig to build himself a fortress and his ‘princess’ a ‘palace’, only to be confronted by the Troll princess and their ugly lame child: an especially memorable scene among many. Realising he’s not yet worthy of Solveig, or ready to settle down – he still has to find himself – Peer takes leave of his mother by taking her on a final ride through his crazy imagination, only to realise she has taken her leave of life.

Obviously in the drama school context one actor can’t hog the role of Peer, so it’s quickly made clear that anyone, male or female, wearing a red beanie is he. But – on opening night, anyway – the rather studious business of introducing this and other physical theatre conventions rendered the wacky tale of derring-do, that establishes Peer as a charismatic bullshit artist, less-than-riveting.

My only other quibble with the first half is that the moment when Peer realises his mother is dead is not emotionally marked. Text rides roughshod over subtext. I’m also thinking a higher dose of youthful testosterone wouldn’t go amiss, although the wide variety of personae this multi-actor Peer brings about is entirely justifiable, given the erratic nature of his character building.

Otherwise everything in the first half is wondrously executed, with a clear and committed understanding of the sometimes surreal text giving rise to strong ensemble work that creates place, mood and a supportive context for each scene to play out in. In each speaking role – and the odd non-speaking one – all the actors find a centred anchor point that allows them to soar and shine while going with the flow and always remaining part of the overall ‘orchestra’.

The actors also provide live sound effects and music, beautifully done. Given they’ve been together for three years, this is company work at a level that our professional theatres, limited to ad-hoc casting for each production, can only dream of.

Brian King’s wide open space, backed with a vast wall of exposed timber-framing stuffed with random clumps of hanging fabric, features two mobile framing-timber structures which are adroitly manoeuvred by the cast to evoke huts, mountain tops, chariots and – later – a ship at sea in a storm, all expertly lit by Karl Jenkins. Rebeka Whale’s costume designs allow for poor theatre rag-bag simplicity on the one hand, while giving strong definition to specific characters where needed.

The second half starts, surprisingly, in the Te Whaea theatre foyer, making superb use of its stairs, balconies, and upper-level walk ways. Now Morocco-based “Sir Peter” is – in his own mind’s eye or at some other level of (sur)reality – a much feted capitalist: an international trader, entrepreneur and self-style Sheik. (Unintentionally, the word “Mahdi” here sounds like “Mâori” as an onto-it academic might say it, and its pejorative tone is a bit unsettling.) But his fortunes are subverted by uprisings and war in Europe that he wants no part in.

Back in the main theatre, Muslim minx Anitra takes Peer for a ride and leaves him stranded in the desert. And still solitary Solveig sings (beautifully) and waits … But first we must indulge Ibsen’s indefatigable imagination involving a Sphinx, a German professor and his asylum full of lunatics, a storm at sea and resulting ship-wreck with its attendant test of ruthless survival, the funeral of a man who chopped a finger off to avoid the war and went on to raise a family that prospered …

As John Bolton notes in the programme, asked why he had written a particular scene, Ibsen answered, “Because I felt like it.” Fine, given he wrote it as an epic poem to be read at leisure. But in live performance, no matter how creative the presentation, information overwhelm soon subverts audience engagement. And the long journey home cannot help but pall when the experiences add little more to Peer’s enlightenment, or ours. Some scenes could well be radically trimmed on a less-is-more basis. On the other hand, performing the full text does add an arguably valuable challenge to a cast that is clearly up to it.

The onion-peeling scene is essential of course, as a metaphor for a man of many veneers. And the Button Moulder, appointed to melt the faulty Peer down so he can be recast, puts a strong survival imperative on Peer’s need to prove he has ever been himself, entire, complete …

Previous translations have made the Troll motto, “To thyself be enough,” a self-limiting negative but McLeish gives it as, “Be true to youself-ish,” which, against my expectations (on reading it), works well in performance. The Button Moulder’s Zen-like answer to what it means to be yourself is simple: “To be yourself is to destroy your Self” (note: it would be 40-odd years until Freud proposed the ego, super ego and id). But the question remains: where and when, if at all, has Peer Gynt ever been himself?

It is a testament to the commitment and integrity of this production that the answer lies convincingly in Solveig’s undying love. And unlike the unresolved Nga Tangata Toa (from The Vikings of Helgeland – see above), it certainly adds to the play’s dramatic structure, regardless of whether we accept the notion without question or debate it after the show, privately or in groups.

All the accolades attributed to the first half apply here too with one proviso: why does Peer not age as others do? The story must take him from young adult to middle age at least. Or is it that he’s still immature inside, until the final epiphany?

A brilliant if flawed (like its anti-hero) play done ingeniously, Peer Gynt is well worth seeing both for itself and as a showcase for a formidable group of graduating actors.

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