Photo: Rene Achenbach
02. September 2024
NN Theater Cologne with “Peer Gynt” in Friedenspark – performance 09/24
The ensemble of the NN Theater Cologne mastered the triple Peer with flying colors in the packed Friedenspark. Over more than 90 minutes, the protagonist from Henrik Ibsen’s poetic pen stretches the truth into wondrous expanses. In the ambience of the open-air stage, the audience quite rightly celebrates the tall tales of Peer Gynt until the lights go out. In the multiple roles of the dreamer with an unhappy childhood and longing for recognition, Christine Peer, Irine Schwarz and Christina Wiesemann shine with joy, rich gestures and charisma, while music director Bernd Kaftan is responsible for the live soundtrack, including conducting the 30-strong choir. Sometimes tragedy, sometimes comedy, then almost operetta with elements of revue – director Rüdiger Pape and his team bring a wide spectrum of styles to the stage. There, the world stretches out into the room like an endless climbing frame. The variable construction serves as a house, a cave, even a palace, as well as a mountain and a ship, is climbed steeply, enticingly covered with billowing cloths and revealed as the place of the imprisoned self. Of course, anything is possible. And of course, this is another illusion in the one-, three- or five-beat version called “being”.
Based on a poem by Norwegian author Ibsen that is more than 150 years old, the premiere reveals the timelessness of the material, in which an impoverished farmer’s son dreams his way through life. Whether he is aware of his talent for lying remains controversial. The young man inevitably draws those around him into his own story of suffering, kidnaps and seduces a bride, rejects her, finally lets himself be blinded by the idea of wealth and moves into a (fantasized) world, reaches for the royal crown of trolls, mutates into a slave trader, ends up in a mental institution despite – or precisely because of – doubting all forms of consciousness and returns to his homeland after many errors. Always accompanied in spirit by his moralizing mother Aase and his secret love for Solvejg, who remains more of a shadow than a tangible body. Finally, Peer even has to fear for his soul, the only real and upright person in his imagination. He desperately apologizes to the emissaries of death. Whether Peer is serious about this is an open question. It also remains a mystery whether the modern version of the classic drama is intended to provoke comparisons to the equally popular “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess from 1962. Peer’s demeanor as a melon-wearing, dystopian trinity is reminiscent of Alex and his gang of disillusioned youths – the Droogs. Like Gynt, they flee from reality into egocentrism in order to survive. With further references to the blockbuster “Titanic”, for example, whose arrogant one-liner “I am the king of the world” was previously used by boxing legend Muhamed Ali, the image of a self-absorbed and therefore tragic protagonist is underlined. A wonderfully human spectacle.
Peer Gynt | Fri 6.9. 7.30 pm | Waldbad Dünnwald | 0176 20 72 78 57 (NN Theater Köln)
Thomas Dahl
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