Word: gynt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last year this policy resulted in the performance of such gems as More Stately Mansions, probably the worst play Eugene O'Neill ever wrote, and Ibsen's four-hour monstrosity Peer Gynt, which lost half its audience at intermission. The Tutor, unfortunately, stands squarely in this venerable Loeb tradition, succeeding neither as allegory nor as entertainment...
...because Ibsen's stage directions (for example: "A jet of fire shoots into the air from the yacht, followed by thick clouds of smoke: a hollow report is heard... Gradually the smoke clears away: the ship has disappeared.") demand technical wizardry far beyond the capabilities of the Loeb. Peer Gynt's production staff should have accepted this, instead of burdening the stage with contraptions planned to meet the author's specifications that only sap the play of its dramatic strength...
Perhaps all these frills were meant to aid our understanding, but they're more distracting than anything else. Actually, Peer Gynt is written on too many levels and with too many intentional ambiguities to be fully grasped. Fundamentally, Peer is a man unwilling to commit himself to any person or principle, who wastes his years seeking fortune and glory, instead of staying at home with Solveig, the woman she loves him. Peer travels not only from Norway to Africa, peasant's hut to mad house, and youth to old age, but into a fantasy world as well. And the trolls...
Ibsen also wrote Peer Gynt to lampoon Norwegian egoism, self-sufficiency (presented as the trolls' motto) and political character, and you can see why almost anyone would be content to glean what meaning he could from the play. But Director Peter Frisch, who seems to want to drive home every nuance, cut the script sufficiently, and Peer Gynt, which runs over three-and-a-half hours, emerges much longer than the dramatic interest warrants...
There are so many admirable elements in Peer Gynt --William Rynders's evocative lighting. Frisch's choreography of group scenes, and several minor performances--that it's too bad the play wasn't produced on a more modest scale. Instead of over-reaching itself and trying to present Ibsen's entire conception, the production should have been, as the trolls might put it, more self-sufficient...