RuhrTriennale
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Peer Gynt A dramatic poem by Henrik Ibsen, German translation by Elisabeth Plessen

Guest performance
Director:
Stage, costumes:
Karl Kneidl
Choreography:
Reinhild Hoffmann
Music:
Georg Klein
Dramaturgy:
Bärbel Jaksch
 
With:
Uwe Bohm, Benjamin Çabuk, Gerd David
with:
Peter Donath
 
With:
Angela Gilges, Ruth Glöss, Ursula Höpfner, Deborah Kaufmann, Alice Kornitzer/Maria Bruckmann, Ann-Marie von Löw, Annett Renneberg, Steffen Roll, Antje Settnik, Judith Strößenreuter, Marko Schmidt, Veit Schubert, Oliver Urbanski, Axel Werner, Angela Winkler, Ronald Zehrfeld
Opening night:
26. September
Start:
7:00 pm
Performances:
27., 30. September, 1., 3. October
Start:
7:00 pm
Price:
Category A
40 €
Category B
30 €
Category C
20 €
Category D
10 €

Berliner Ensemble: Zadek is rehearsing Peer Gynt with Uwe Bohm in the title role. »What does being oneself mean« asks Peer Gynt. The rehearsal comes to a halt, caught up on this well justified question. »What does it mean« Zadek shouts out from the auditorium, getting into his stride as he continues speaking. He speaks about the Peer-Gynt-feeling, about Ibsen's snobbery and his creative hatred of all things mediocre.
Zadek has dwelt in Ibsen's world again and again. The Norwegian writer has been his most constant intellectual reference, after Shakespeare. Next comes burgeoning rage and contempt. He has suddenly become the main player in this Ibsenesque world: arrogant and elitist. Watching him forget himself, the way that his intelligent, precise anger switches on the actors' antenna, watching him in this moment of discarding the self, is to gain an insight into the interior of his authority. »Each person has an idea of his own nature. A very good idea even.« Sentences which stick in the memory because they bring the audience up to eye-level. For a fraction of a second everyone has a crystal-clear vision of their own existence.

A country lad wants to become an emperor. Idolized and cursed by his mother and excluded by the folk of his Norwegian mountain village, he tells wondrous tales about himself. He kidnaps the daughter of the richest farmer shortly before her wedding then leaves her because he has fallen in love with another girl, Solveig. Having been declared an outlaw, he flees from the village and later from his native country, falling amongst mountain trolls, meeting monkeys in Morocco and landing up in a Cairolunatic asylum; in America he becomes a ship owner, a slave trader and trapper, he survives the disappointments of love and shipwrecks.
He returns home as an old man, full of self-reproach and the fear of death he searches for a centre to his life despite God and the Devil, and finds Solveig again. Following on from productions of Ibsen's A Doll's House, The Wild Duck, The Master Builder, Hedda Gabler, the late work When We Dead Awaken and most recently the much celebrated production of Rosmersholm, Peter Zadek is turning his attention to Ibsen's mythical story of the search for the self: »Peer, it is you!«

A guest performance by the Berliner Ensemble in cooperation with the Schauspielhaus Bochum.