Peter Viney's Blog

Peter Gynt
by David Hare
After Henrik Ibsen

Directed by Jonathan Kent

Olivier Theatre
National Theatre, London
(co-production with Edinburgh International Festival)

Saturday 13th July 2019, 13.00

CAST

James McArdle – Peter Gynt
Ann Louise Ross – Agatha, his mother
Isabelle Joss – Carol from next door / Alicia Yesenin, a Russian businesswoman
Lorne MacFayden – Duncan
Tamsin Carroll – Singer / Woman in Green / Anitra
Jonathan Coy – Bride’s Father / Bertram, the Mountain King / Begriffenfeldt, director of a madhouse in Egypt
Lauren Ellis-Steele- Shirley / Cowgirl
Hannah Viscocchi – Penny / Cowgirl
Dani Heron – Shania / Cowgirl
Rehanna MacDonald- Ruthie
Adam McNamarr – Minister / Gunnar Grimmson, an Icelandic banker
Ezra Haroque Khan – Sabine’s Father, an immigrant / Sea Captain
Anya Chalotra – Sabine, an immigrant
Tia Dutt – Pauline, Sabine’s 8 year old siatwe
Martin Quinn – Spudface
Jalinder Singh Randhawa – Bobby
Ryan Hunter- Shug
Philip Cairns – Kieran
Andrew Fraser- Gaz
Caroline Deyga – Ingrid
Marc Mackinnon – Tonto / Cook
Nabil Shaban – The Boyg
Sonnyboy Skelton – The Two Headed Boy
Guy Henry- Monsieur Ballon / Weird Passenger
Oliver Ford Davies – The Button Moulder

The company also play  wedding guests, cowgirls, trolls, hyenas, Saudi royalty, Philanthropists, Lunatics, Churchgoers, Lunatics, Sailors, Mourners

Henrik Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt as a rambling verse fantasy in 1867, and it was only after Greig’s music that it became a play to be performed rather than read. The night before we had seen Noel Coward’s Present Laughter where the lead, playing a musical comedy actor, expresses horror at doing Peer Gynt. It has a certain theatrical notoriety, in that it’s dense, and weird and has trolls in the Hall of the Mountain King, reindeer, a “button moulder” as a major character and a two-headed boy who turns out to be Peer’s son. Worse, it can run for five hours uncut – and it was written years before Ibsen’s naturalistic drama (and one might add a good decade before he worked out how to write a decent play.)  David Hare has decided to re-imagine it in a contemporary setting, and “by David Hare after Henrik Ibsen” is fair. This is the team behind The Young Chekhov season at Chichester, then at the National Theatre. David Hare as writer / adaptor, Jonathan Kent director, and James McArdle in the lead role.

James McCardle is Peter Gynt, starting out emerging from the sky as a returning soldier to his Scottish village. He’s a fantasist and recounts his exploits which turn out to be from films … The Guns of Navarone, The Dambusters, CloseEncounters of The Third Kind. He later mentions Alive! as well as the recent TV series The Bodyguard and referencing both Poldark and Downton Abbey. His old girlfriend, Ingrid, is getting married. We see the wedding party and Peter manages to screw her before the bridegroom does.

The wedding party on a truck

He meets three singing / dancing cowgirls (replacing trolls) then the male trolls, and their hall of the mountain king has become a Bullingdon Club style banquet. He is forced to marry the troll king’s daughter.

In the Hall of The Mountain King

He visits his mum’s deathbed. Then he becomes a Trump style golf course owning capitalist and arms dealer in a white suit. He visits a “Davos in the Desert” conference “The World Improvement Forum’  in Saudi Arabia. He’s regarded as a guru. He loses his money, crashes a plane in North Africa and has to resort to cannibalism (Alive! is the story of the rugby team that crashed in the Andes).  He’s surrounded by hyenas. Then to Egypt to meet various worthies at an institution for the mad – an ex-prime minister, a writer.

Act 5

In the final act he has aged a lot and appears on a boat amid the waves. It sinks and he murders the cook by drowning him. Then he meets the Button Moulder. You can go to heaven or hell if you can prove good or bad enough, but mostly you’re melted down for buttons. Peter was mostly ‘the greatest liar on Earth’. The end. Confused? You will be. I really simplified that.

The Olivier Theatre has such a huge stage and such possibilities for extravagant and magnificent sets and staging, that the National Theatre is forced to display its full possibilities at least once a season. Sometimes it works, sometimes it drips “loadsamoney” and sets one thinking about the proportion of the Arts Council theatre budget which is hoovered up by the Opera (a ludicrous 62% of the budget) and to a lesser degree by the National Theatre. The Royal Opera House alone is on £24 million a year. The NT gets £16.7 million. The RSC is the other big one. In Peter Gynt we get a moving celestial stairway, a little house that moves off self-propelled,  a sloping stage with holes through which characters can pop up, curtains, palm trees, Norwegian black trees, projections, a golf course and then top it with a plane crash (yes, that is “a plane crash”).

After the plane crash – up a palm tree to escape the hyenas

Then there is the prow of a huge boat moving around. We get the whole cast dressed as Peter Gynt with vermilion chairs, and a back projection of hundreds more Peter Gynts with vermilion chairs. Before the play started, we recalled cars being driven onto the NT stage in Twelfth Night and Man and Superman and wondered what vehicle we might see tonight. Not content with cars … this was a full size truck with a village dance taking place on the flatbed. This is a spectacular production, one could almost say,  worth seeing for the effects alone.

Amidst all that there are many very funny and pointed single lines in the text. Peter says at the conference that he learned:

From the Russians a Happy-Go-Lucky attitude to the sanctity of human life.

The third lunatic is a writer talking about his characters with a strong current theatre sideswipe:

I made them women. I made them black. I made them Australian. I gave them disabilities. I gave them back stories. I gave them front stories. I threw them over cliffs. I made them gender-fluid.

Interesting. As reviews note, none of the women in Peer Gynt rise above two-dimensional. They’re dancing, singing, dying or up for it. For the NT, it’s rare to see no black performers. The immigrant family are the only BAME actors. Unlike other subsidized theatres, everyone has four limbs and can walk, hear, speak and see.

The fourth lunatic is stuck in the past remembering when …

… when cricket always lasted three days. At least. The beer was warm and the passports were blue. There was deference. There was respect. People didn’t split infinitives. Children were kept in corners and beaten. Everyone was white!

The second lunatic is the ex-prime minister who loved chillaxing – didn’t David Cameron use the word? It’s even handed. I have scoured the text for a line we both remembered, but either I’m missing it or it was added later. There was something about a leader or politicians from jumped-up polytechnics, which we assumed referenced Jeremy Corbyn.

The cowgirls song

The music, composed by Paul Englishby,  is very good … especially the Cowgirls song, and the later song from the four girls. We looked at the two musician’s galleries at the start of the third part (or Act 5) and though there was an unaccompanied ballad solo at the start of Act 5  from Tamsin Carroll, the band were apparently dispensed with. They should have spread the music out more. We said afterwards, the songs were very strong. Add five or six more and make it a musical.

It is long, or even LONG, though not the three and a half hours mentioned by most reviews. The matinee starts at one. That length includes two fifteen minute intervals, and in any case by the three and a half hour mark at 4.30, we had queued and collected our carry-on bags from the cloakroom, limped downstairs and walked slowly to Waterloo Station, just in time to miss the 16.35. We’d have caught it if it had left at the other end of the station. Hare retained the five act structure of Ibsen’s original in the new version (or re-imagining). Acts one to three run together to the first interval … 80 minutes, then Act 4 runs to the second interval (40 minutes) and Act 5 to the end. Act 4 was easily the strongest part of the play.

It’s also true that it’s not going down that well. Reviews mention empty seats after the intervals … Just looking forward from my seat (say less than half the stalls) I counted nine empty seats after the first interval (two directly in front of us), fourteen after the second. That’s a seat clearance rate (at £55 a seat too) only matched by The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at The Globe, and that’s mainly due to discomfort on wooden benches with no backs. Not that the Olivier is comfortable. The strong rake that gives such good sight lines also means no room for feet under the seat in front.

Peter and his mum. The deathbed scene. I saw some of it.

I’ve sometimes felt sleepy in the afternoon theatre, and at Bath and Chichester elderly snoozing and snoring patrons are a regular feature. This is the first time I have fully fallen asleep. It was right at the end of Act 3 when Peter and his mother, Agatha, have a LONG deathbed conversation. I was only out for a minute, my companion assures me, but when she nudged me rather more sharply than necessary, I was actually dreaming, not merely dozing. I could blame the anti-histamine, but I’d rather blame Agatha’s strong Scottish accent and limited projection. I couldn’t follow what they were saying. The play is a co-production with the Edinburgh Festival, hence the initial setting in Dunoon and the Scottish accents. In the wedding scene it was like walking into a Glasgow pub with a loud jukebox and severe ear wax. McArdle’s accent was strong, but then his projection is superb to compensate. I note that in the play text, at the beginning of Act 4 (or Part two as far as playgoers are concerned) David Hare writes: His accent has become less marked. It did indeed, and it was a relief.

The reviews? Mainly two stars. Fergus Morgan did an overview of reviews for The Stage and concluded:

David Hare’s rewrite is awkward, unwieldy and unsubtle, and can’t be rescued by either an impressively expensive production from Jonathan Kent, nor a powerhouse performance from James McCardle. Two star reviews from The Stage, Time Out, Times, Telegraph, Evening Standard and others suggest that this is another stinker in the NT’s biggest theatre. Fergus Morgan, The Stage.

Reviews all note how many David Hare plays the National Theatre has done in recent years. Perhaps he has had a lion’s share. That leads to criticism if you falter in the slightest.

My conclusion is that both four star and two star reviews are right at different times. McArdle is a brilliant actor and hardly leaves the stage. There were splendid theatrical moments and incomprehensible meandering dull bits too. Like Sarah Crompton, I think three star is the fair result.

***

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID:

four star
Michael Billington, The Guardian ****

a sharp satire on contemporary mores … Hare has fashioned from this unruly epic an intriguing new work that exposes the madness of the modern world.

Paul Taylor, The Independent ****

This show – sharply etched across the board by a populous crack cast – is a mighty achievement and one of which the NT can be justly proud.

Mark Shenton, London Theatre ****

three star

Sarah Crompton. What’s On Stage ***

this version is never boring (which Peer Gynt can be) but it doesn’t ever quite resolve the mad veering between fantasy and reality that characterises the original, and in fact introduces some discordant key changes all of its own.

two star
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph **

And now the powers that be have programmed Ibsen’s 1867 sprawling epic in which a man tries to find himself, at inordinate length, and – guess what? – produced an interminable bore, which even on the official opening night had audience-members abandoning ship during its two intervals … … for all the resources Jonathan Kent’s three-hours plus production throws at it, a sense of aimlessness and even amateurishness takes hold … the grim conclusion that (Gynt) has aimed high and achieved only mediocrity fully extends to the show itself.

Quentin Letts, The Sunday Times **

It is wildly showy, but all this displacement activity creates muddle and fails to conceal the hole at the centre of Ibsen’s story. It’s Faustus without Mephistopheles. Peter / Peer’s failings are not the result of any tragic choice. He is not properly wicked. He is just, like his creator, an over-indulged self-polishing bore

Natasha Tripney, The Stage **
Clive Davis, The Times **
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out **
Nick Curtis, Standard **

The charismatic James McCardle falls back on bluster and showman’s patter because he’s playing a character with no character. Most of the supporting roles are so thin they barely register. Women inevitably submit to Gynt, whether ardently o rreluctatly.

Phil Wilmott, London Box Office **

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

DAVID HARE
Racing Demon, Bath 2017
Skylight West End
Plenty, Chichester 2019
Platonov Chichester 2015
Ivanov Chichester 2015
The Seagull Chichester 2015

JONATHAN KENT
The Height of The Storm, Florian Zeller, Bath 2018
Sweet Bird of Youth, Chichester, 2017
Gypsy by Arthur Laurents / Stephen Sondheim, Chichester Festival Theatre, 2014
Platonov Chichester 2015
Ivanov Chichester 2015
The Seagull Chichester 2015

JAMES McARDLE
Platonov Chichester 2015
Ivanov Chichester 2015
The Seagull Chichester 2015

OLIVER FORD DAVIES
Richard II, RSC, 2013
Henry V, RSC 2015
The Chalk Garden, Chichester 2018
Troilus & Cressida, RSC 2018

JONATHAN COY
Platonov Chichester 2015
Ivanov Chichester 2015
Black Comedy, Chichester 2014