Peer Gynt

Peer Gynt is a five-act play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, written in Italy and published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal in 1867. It is one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays. Peer Gynt chronicles the journey of its title character from the Norwegian mountains to the North African desert and back. According to Klaus Van Den Berg, "its origins are romantic, but the play also anticipates the fragmentations of emerging modernism" and the "cinematic script blends poetry with social satire and realistic scenes with surreal ones." Peer Gynt has also been described as the story of a life based on procrastination and avoidance. Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in deliberate disregard of the limitations that the conventional stagecraft of the 19th century imposed on drama. Its forty scenes move uninhibitedly in time and space and between consciousness and the unconscious, blending folkloric fantasy and unsentimental realism. Raymond Williams compares Peer Gynt with August Strindberg's early drama Lucky Peter's Journey (1882) and argues that both explore a new kind of dramatic action that was beyond the capacities of the theatre of the day; both created "a sequence of images in language and visual composition" that "became technically possible only in film." Ibsen believed Per Gynt, a Norwegian fairy tale the play is loosely inspired by, to be rooted in fact. Ibsen also wrote that he had used his own family and childhood memories as "as some kind of model" for the Gynt family; he acknowledged that the character of Åse—Peer Gynt's mother—was based on his own mother, Marichen Altenburg, while Peer's father Jon Gynt is widely interpreted as based on Ibsen's father Knud Ibsen. He was also generally inspired by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's collection of Norwegian fairy tales, published in 1845 (Huldre-Eventyr og Folkesagn).