Overview

Peer Gynt is a five-act play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. Written in the Bokmal form of Norwegian, it is one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays. Ibsen believed Per Gynt, the Norwegian fairy tale on which the play is loosely based, to be rooted in fact, and several of the characters are modelled after Ibsen's own family, notably his parents Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg. He was also generally inspired by Peter Christen Asbjornsen's collection of Norwegian fairy tales, published in 1845 (Huldre-Eventyr og Folkesagn). Klaus Van Den Berg argues that Peer Gynt, is a stylistic minefield: its origins are romantic, but the play also anticipates the fragmentations of emerging Modernism. Chronicling Peer's journey from the Norwegian mountains to the North African desert, the cinematic script blends poetry with social satire and realistic scenes with surreal ones. The irony of isolated individuals in a mass society infuses Ibsen's tale of two seemingly incompatible lovers-the deeply committed Solveig and the superficial Peer, who is more a surface for projections than a coherent character. The simplest conclusion one may draw from Peer Gynt, is expressed in the eloquent prose of the Van Den Berg: if you lie; are you real?

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