Heading into London’s Coronet Theatre for just two nights, The Story of Peer Gynt allows us to spend an hour or so in the company of Kåre Conradi, artistic director of the Norwegian Ibsen Company.
This dramatised lecture – what’s a dramatised lecture? It’s an educational performance with academic content and theatrical techniques – focuses on Peer Gynt, Ibsen’s 1867 play.
The play runs over five acts and forty scenes, from the prosaic to the fantastical. The character of Peer Gynt is egotist, fantasist, and wanderer. To capture this journey of many years in an hour seems a tall order.
But Conradi proves to be a master storyteller, drawing us into the complexities of the story with humour and insight. He gives the characters clarity and celebrates the poetry of the original Norwegian text.
In Conradi’s close study of Ibsen’s deeply imaginative drama, he strips back the layers to highlight the charm and conceit of the central character. Whether hunting deer, abducting women, getting chummy with trolls, or being deified in the desert, Peer Gynt has an eventful life.
Offering a mischievous slant on Norway’s life and literature, Conradi’s lecture is an engaging watch. He banters with lighting designer Anders Busch about his understated but atmospheric lighting, and delivers one passage from the play directly to a front-row audience member.
This is not a static experience. Conradi moves, dances, even sings at one moment. His energy and love of the material is obvious. He offers alternative translation of some lines, discusses Grieg’s incidental music for the play, and muses on Ibsen’s artistic decisions like the flying pig in act 2.
Presenting The Story of Peer Gynt on a bare stage with just one chair as a prop, your gaze is always on this one performer as he conjures up images from the mother on the roof to the troll palace. If you don’t know the play you may get less out of this, although key moments of plot are described.
Conradi’s Norwegian Ibsen Company is only a decade old – for a poet whose reputation in his home country is equivalent to Shakespeare in hours it seems astonishing nothing was in place before.
Incidentally, if this whets your appetite for more Ibsen, check out the BBCiPlayer for numerous television adaptations and documentaries under the banner Henrik Ibsen at the BBC.
I’m giving The Story of Peer Gynt four stars.
The Story of Peer Gynt was at the Coronet Theatre on 19-20 Feb 2026.