At a time of rampant individualism, the story of Peer Gynt comes to us as a cautionary tale about selfhood. Written in 1867, while Ibsen was journeying around Europe in self-imposed exile from Norway, his imagination (appositely) started frothing with the tales of a feckless adventurer. This anti-hero, Peer Gynt, turns away from the motto of men as preached by Shakespeare’s Polonius, ‘to thine own self be true’. Instead, he endorses the philosophy of ‘to thine own self be enough’, joining the ranks of Ibsen’s trolls, who emblematise the egoists that strive for self-satisfaction and shirk moral responsibilities.
The play is known for its surrealistic transformations and improbable flights of fancy, including heroic reindeer rides, orgies with herd girls, and Peer’s recurrent delusion that he is destined to be ‘emperor of the world’. (Victorian illustrator Arthur Rackham later represented its hallucinogenic quality in lively drawings of gnarled goblins and woodland fantasia.) For this reason, Ibsen conceived of Peer Gynt as a ‘dramatic poem’ rather than a play. But its vivid narrative has been inspiring theatre-makers since 1876, when Edvard Grieg wrote a score encapsulating the tumult of Peer’s psychological trajectory, transitioning from moments of quiet reflection to the exultancies of a soaring imagination in preposterously grand climaxes.
Kåre Conradi, in his new show ‘The Story of Peer Gynt’, offers his audience a personal take on this sprawling tale. He manages to condense the poem into an intimate one-man performance punctuated with explanations about the literary history of his material, self-referential comments on translations (he recommends Peter Watts), and dryly ironic asides that endear him to his spectators. For those unfamiliar with the epic nature of the story, Conradi provides an accessible point of entry but maintains textual integrity through frequent glottal performances of the original Norwegian. Poetry, he contends, operates through visceral feeling as much as literal comprehension. Of course, it helps that he uses his physicality, through deftly miming and contorting his body, to suggest the unfolding action.
The Coronet stage remains bare apart from a single chair, so Conradi relies on the oldest form of storytelling, where the audience are invited to be conspirators who willingly suspend their disbelief. His deep affinity with the text and imaginative belief in Peer’s world make this light labour. Two particular moments stand out. One is when Peer callously crashes Ingrid’s wedding. Conrad superbly conveys his brutal apathy in eloping with her to the mountains and leaving her seduced and forlorn. The other is when a remorseful Peer returns to visit his much-abused mother on her deathbed; he crouches down and uses his seductive voice to delight her with reassuring tales about the life to come.
Conradi’s sole assistant in all this tale-spinning is dexterous light designer Anders Busch. He favours intense spotlights in moments of introspection and plays with colour washes as Peer frolics carelessly across the world. For instance, when Peer reaches the African deserts, intense golden shafts of sunlight brilliantly evoke the sultry atmosphere.
The entrancing production is enough to send one scrambling for a copy of the dramatic poem. And this is what Conradi ultimately sets out to achieve. Due to time constraints and the staging limitations here, it would not be possible to literally recreate the dreamy spectacles of Ibsen’s proto-cinematic vision. Yet this actor-storyteller implies that perhaps it is through the boundaryless eyes of fantasy—where anything can happen, where words are a passport to another plane of existence—that Ibsen’s tale is best experienced. If Peer learns that to live for oneself is never truly fulfilling, to share the tales that lie closest to one’s heart, as Conradi does, is an act of great artistic generosity.
Directed by Kåre Conradi
Based on Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen
Adapted by Elizabeth Gording and Kåre Conradi
Until: Saturday 21st February 2026
Running Time: 70 minutes, with no interval
Review by Olivia Hurton