Peer Gynt (Schauspielhaus Graz)

This review is for the Wednesday, May 4th, 2011 performance of Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen from the Hauptbühne at the Schauspielhaus in Graz.

Acting - 6/10
Direction - 6/10
Design - 7/10
Affectiveness - 3/10

Overall - 6/10

I had never seen or read Peer Gynt prior to experiencing this performance and in the case of Ingo Berk's mosaic of a production, that was probably a good thing.

Stage. Inside a ship or coffin.

I had difficulty understanding the story. Granted it was in German and occationally I have difficultly understanding certain words but in the case of this production its the story-telling that suffers not my language proficiency. I am a great fan of Henrik Ibsen and have read many of his other plays but something about this production seemed unusual, un-Ibsen-esque. At first, I thought 'Well you don't know everything Victoria, maybe Ibsen did write Peer Gynt in sets of disorganized scenes asking for three different actors to play the title character simultaneously.' However, that thought didn't feel right, Ibsen wrote many naturalistic plays and even those plays that weren't very naturalistic still had character with archs and stories with plots that were directly based on the idea cause-and-effect. This production was lacking that throughline.

It was when I got home and had a look at the actual play that I realized Berk's performance text was nothing like Ibsen's script. Berk had taken the play and put it into a blender! Claudius Körber played the Peer from Act 1-3, Sebastian Reiß from Act 4, and Gerhard Balluch the elder Peer from Act 5. The acts were inwoven; the play started with the beginning of the 5th Act. It's this patchwork of plot that left myself, and many audience members, questioning the plot. Many of us lost the meaning of the play and were left with just visually interesting affects from odd juxtapositions.

The 3 Peer Gynts: Claudius Körber, Gerhard Balluch, and Sebastian Rieß

Having the 3 Peers on the stage together reminded me of the final act of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, where both the events of the early 1800's and late 1900's get enacted in the same room at the same time, where members of each time period use the exact same properties (eg. Wine Glass) which creates a tension between our understanding of time and space. There is a wonderful journal article written on this topic I found in a drama journal in university on Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and the fifth wall (can't quite remember what it was called, but it was great). This sharing time and space in something unique to theatre and I am assuming Berk major draw to splitting Peer into 3 roles. The convention sort of worked and sort of didn't. It gave the audience the stages of man in plain sight, so we are confronted the central theme of aging head on. However, the effect wasn't strong enough. Frankly, the script alone delivers that message, pretty bluntly actually, so all the division of Peer into 3 actors and the mixing of scenes did was was confuse and ultimately take away from the playwrights artifice.

On the whole, the acting was good. But sometimes it felt too out there and sometimes too safe. The ensemble did a great job of giving each small role they played a very specific character which gave the production life as well as kept me interested in the piece. Claudius Körber had an odd vocal rhythm which made him hard to understand. Also his character arch was non-existant, it didn't seem as if his Peer learned anything through the THREE acts he played. Sebastian Rieß was bold and eye catching, but when left alone without some other actor to work off of  he was somewhat dull and out of place (maybe a fault of the direction?). Gerhard Balluch had the task of making the audience believe the other two Peers were a part of his Peer's past which wasn't always believeable except for the Onion monologue. The onion monologue, because of it's story telling nature highlighted the different actors giving the audience a nice visual roadmap of the character which Balluch supplied for us through a strong performance.

I wouldn't recommend this production to the casual or conservative theatre goer, only maybe to those who are familiar with the play and want to see a production that does what it wants with the plot. For a newby to Ibsen I would rather suggest they read the play.