Saturday, October 07, 2006
‘Peer Gynt’
New York Times: "Beautiful images of Norwegian fields and fjords scrolled across a video screen. Lovely music squeezed out of inferior speakers at the sides of the stage. Actors in costume performed snippets of texts. Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” has a complicated and diverse geography, but the abridgement of it that came to the Delacorte Theater in Central Park on Thursday was like a package tour, down to the pretty landscape photos in the accompanying guidebook, sorry, program."
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As Ibsen's last verse play, "Peer Gynt" is naturally not a walk in the park to understand. While this production does seem like more of a tourist trap rather than a great piece of theater, it is hard to follow regardless of the audience's native language. It appears as if the production attempted to bring "Peer Gynt" to the US without fully translating the play, but tried to cut corners by using projections and only partially translated segments to explain the play to the audience. While it would be an almost impossible task, I think it would have proved more beneficial if the entire play had been translated, and the production had been treated like an original production, instead of trying to transform an already Norwegian text and cast. While there may be something nestalgic about seeing an original cast, and much of the original text, much of that just confused those unexposed to Ibsen, and those who know Ibsen criticized the production for missing the point.
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