Dominic Hill interview: Ibsen's play for today

Published on Thursday 21 May 2009 17:43

DOMINIC HILL HASN'T FORGOT-ten the night he was kept awake by the sounds of country & western music at a raucous wedding in a small Scottish coastal town. The then artistic director of Dundee Rep – now at the Traverse – was lying awake thinking about Peer Gynt.

There was something in the strains of Kenny Rodgers, the karaoke and the drunken laughter that crystallised in his sleepless head a way to stage Ibsen's epic verse-drama. Pitched against the insular confines of a small Scottish town, the Norwegian folk-hero made a new kind of sense.

Hill's version of Peer Gynt, a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland, earned rave reviews when it was staged at Dundee Rep in 2007. Colin Teevan's new adaptation was a visceral, foul-mouthed high-energy-ride of a show, acclaimed for its ambition and the way it dragged Peer kicking and swearing into the 21st century.

"We set out to find a way to make it work, to stage it, but also to make it accessible and relevant to a wide audience, and we're pleased that that has succeeded," says Hill. The Scotsman theatre critic Joyce McMillan described it as "the finest piece of classic theatre Scotland has produced in half a decade... Ibsen's masterpiece (is] reborn as a piece of world-class popular theatre for our time." The production has now been revived for a run at the Barbican in London, and a Scottish tour.

It's a remarkable achievement for a play which has frequently been labelled "unstageable", with its leaps in time and place, apes and trolls, mixture of myth and realism, dream sequences and delusions.

There is doubt as to whether Ibsen ever meant it to be staged when he wrote it in 1867, though he was persuaded to edit it for a stage version nine years later. In Willy Russell's play Educating Rita, Rita responds to the question "How would you improve a production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt?" with the succinct solution: "Do it on the radio."

Nevertheless, the history of western theatre has been littered with attempts to stage it, and often modernise it, with greater or lesser success, including one by Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa, who set the action inside a video game. The "unstageable" tag is something of a gauntlet, says Gerry Mulgrew, who plays the older Peer Gynt in this production.

"I did it about 25 years ago with Pocket Theatre. I played Peer all the way through and directed it. It was completely insane, but it worked because there's a lot of storytelling in it. It's not easy to stage, but think how it would have been in Ibsen's time. We're quite used to a storytelling type of theatre now that switches between locations and ideas, internal and external."

Adapter Colin Teevan (writer of Dundee Rep's successful Monkey, and of My Teacher's A Troll, on tour this spring with the NTS) says he aimed to "recontextualise Peer Gynt so the audience could experience the radical force of Ibsen's vision in the present". His Peer is a lager-swilling foul-mouthed womaniser, but he is also a dreamer, a poet, a rebel without a cause. He's always on the cusp of losing our sympathy. One London critic referred to him as Rab C Nesbitt without the charm.

"He's repulsive and adorable at the same time," says Hill. "A lot of people tell us they find that attractive – the loveable rogue. He may be a fantasist, but there's something about him, larger than life, more ambitious and imaginative than any of the closed population from whence he's come."

Keith Fleming, who plays Young Peer, says: "Early on, Dominic used the example of Pete Doherty, this poet, musician, who has had a major drug problem, people think of him as despicable, but at the same time attractive. There's something about him. Why does he attract the likes of Kate Moss?

"Also, would you rather have your rock stars like Pete Doherty or like Billy Ray Cyrus? You want your rock stars to be rock stars, you don't want them to be insipid. You want that creativity, you don't want middle of the road safeness. Peer says it's better to be completely bad than mediocre."

For both Fleming (who takes the lead in the first half) and Mulgrew (who leads in the second) it's an exhausting, upstoppable ride. Both performances have been highly acclaimed – they shared the CATS Award for Best Actor in 2007, but both admit they're glad not to be doing the whole thing.

"It's like an assault course or a ride of some kind," says Fleming. "Once you start you can't stop. I love hearing the interval, Gerry dreads it. Of all the parts I've done, it's the one that's taken over the most, it is very consuming, physically and emotionally."

Mulgrew says: "I'm only on for an hour and seven minutes, but it's like one big operatic aria. It's relentless. The character has to drive every scene, that's unusual."

In fact, from the first minute, when Peer jumps up on the breakfast table to recount his fabled journey on the back of a rampaging stag to his mother, he never stops moving. He gatecrashes a wedding and elopes with the bride, is seduced by three nymphomaniac mountain women and ends up in the hall of the mountain king (the appropriately named King Bastard). Even when he meets the love of his life, the quiet Solveig (Ashley Smith), he can't stop.

Smith, 23, a recent graduate of the RSAMD, last seen in pink hair extensions in Stellar Quines' Baby Baby, is new to the show for the revival. "I think Solveig sees through Peer," Smith says. "She sees that a lot of what he's doing is a bit of an act. She understands him more than anybody else in the play does, but at the same time is quite attracted to his craziness and his wildness.

"Solveig is the most difficult character I've played so far. Her whole sacrifice is really hard to understand, to make the decision at 16 years old to wait 50 or 60 years for somebody. Every time I do the show I pick up something different and understand something else differently, which is great, it's really exciting."

After the interval, Peer pops up in Morocco, 30 years older. He's a successful businessman who has made a fortune in gun-running and people trafficking. He's a guru. He's on TV. He's in an asylum. He's being pelted by shit-throwing apes. Then he's on his way home (the traditional shipwreck replaced by a plane crash on a budget airline) unfulfilled after all by a life of wealth, crime and celebrity. He hasn't yet cracked the secret of how to be himself.

Dominic Hill says: "The whole second half is very much about identity, not wasting your life, the sense of looking after number one at the expense of your own personal happiness, and at the expense of those around you who love you. There's an obsession with the self. In a world where celebrity seems to be so important, and anybody can succeed, it definitely seems worth staging Peer Gynt from a contemporary point of view."

Mulgrew describes Act 2 as a "critique of celebrity culture". Fleming adds: "A lot of people today are preoccupied with being famous. This really weird route that people take, without being any good at anything you become a celebrity, it's become almost an occupation. Then someone else comes along and they're discarded or dropped. It's like take-away fast-food celebrity."

But crucial to unlocking Peer Gynt is the small-town world from which he comes, the small-minded, back-biting villagers, thuggish men and gallous, drunken women who prey on him because he's different.

Hill says: "I was reading the play again and thinking how engaging the story of this guy is, who everybody loves and also hates, who is a poet, a fantasist, lives in a community that doesn't understand or like him. Then I started thinking about remote Scottish towns and villages, and suddenly it felt very real and very modern." Some drunks at a wedding have no idea what they started.

• Peer Gynt is at Dundee Rep, 26-30 May; His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, 2-6 June; Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, 9-13 June; Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 17-20 June; Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 23-27 June.