Theatre review: Peter Gynt

The latest main-stage epic at the National is largely selling itself on the way it reunites the creatives from 2016 hit Young Chekhov on the Olivier stage - adaptor David Hare, director Jonathan Kent and star James McArdle. Building the whole show around the latter, Hare has transported Henrik Ibsen's weird social fantasy Peer Gynt to Scotland, although much of the mythology remains jarringly Nordic. Retitled Peter Gynt, it sees McArdle's title character starting out as a lovable fantasist, returning to Scotland from a war in which he's seemingly made a name for himself, except all his exploits start to sound suspiciously familiar to anyone who's seen any movies*. In reality, his biggest claim to fame is fighting mechanic Duncan (o hai, Lorne McFadyen,) but he gets the idea for a bigger stunt when he finds out his ex-girlfriend Ingrid (Caroline Deyga) has got together with Spudface (Martin Quinn) in his absence.

He abducts Ingrid from her own wedding, only to dump her the next day, becoming the town pariah, and hiding in the woods as the bride's father takes out his anger on Peter's mother Agatha (Ann Louise Ross.)

So far his exploits haven't matched his stories' scale but now his adventures see him trapped in the hall of the Mountain King (Jonathan Coy,) who's trying to marry him off to his daughter The Woman in Green (Tamsin Carroll,) contemplating cannibalism after a plane crash strands him in the desert, and nearly becoming king of a madhouse full of men driven crazy by their own self-involvement. Playing in three acts with two intervals, Peter Gynt is strongest in the first act, when Hare seems most in control both of Ibsen's crazy plot and of what he himself is trying to say with it, and McArdle's famous charm is easily able to carry the day. But the time-jump into the second act finds Peter a billionnaire press baron who made his money arms dealing, and such an unlikeable character it's beyond even McArdle's ability to sell him as a lovable rogue.

Rather than a straightforward adaptation of Peer Gynt, Peter Gynt is described as "by David Hare, after Henrik Ibsen," but for me its problems lie with the fact that it's not really either of those things. Hare's identified a valid modern take on Ibsen's journey searching for the self, in self-involvement and the idea of people trying to present their lives as a story. But instead of using the original as a jumping-off point he continues to stick pretty closely to Ibsen's batshit insane story, and the modern references often feel crowbarred in: The trolls as the Bullingdon Club; a Russian oligarch dressed as *nn W*dd*c*mb* for some inexplicable reason; in the original Peer has all his cash stolen from him, which Hare clumsily turns into Peter's funds being cleared out because someone got hold of his laptop. The accents are mainly Scottish as is much of the cast, but there isn't much of a Celtic feel to the play's mythology - the encounter with trolls in the middle of a mountain remains resolutely Norwegian.

Richard Hudson's designs are an inarguable star of the show though, right from the opening as Peter makes his entrance through a door in the sky they nail the epic sense that often derails the play itself: Hare may be attempting to criticise his protagonist for his misogyny, but the fact is the play forgets his love interest Sabine (Anya Chalotra) for most of the evening just like Peter does. The occasional use of song (composed by Paul Englishby) suddenly seems to turn into a full-on musical in the second act, then toned down again for the final one. Oliver Ford Davies provides a stabilising influence to these closing scenes with his kindly but brutally pragmatic take on a sort of angel of death, who helps finally bring focus back to the story. For me Peter Gynt never quite tipped over into being outright boring - Kent and Hudson's staging always has a new bizarre twist I MEAN WT ACTUAL F WAS GOING ON WITH THE TREE PEOPLE even when the story starts to plod - but it's hard work at times, and gets itself too tangled up in its own story to figure out what it's actually trying to say.

Peter Gynt by David Hare after Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen is booking in reprtory until the 8th of October at the National Theatre's Olivier; and from the 1st to the 10th of August at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre.

Running time: 3 hours 25 minutes including two intervals.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

*in a nice little in-joke, Peter almost could be telling the truth when he appropriates the plot of Chariots of Fire; except he remembers himself as the Scottish Christian character, when McArdle actually played the English Jewish one