Endangered Productions is a semi-professional music theatre company that performs forgotten gems of the repertoire, generally in intimate performances. Their production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, with Grieg’s music, is an attempt to replicate the staging of 1876. Written as a massive rhyming poem in 1867, Ibsen was determined to overcome the querulous reception that greeted its publications, by creating a theatrical version - not really altering its monumental structure but shortening some of the text, at the same time inviting Grieg to compose original incidental music.
It is a poetic drama that demands amazing scenic effects. It rides on gigantic leaps of imagination. It is modern (or Shakespearean) in its confounding complexity and its ramshackle narrative. The older Ibsen called it “wild and formless, recklessly written”. Its deep symbolism and earthiness, its ancient folk roots and its cosmopolitan edge make it a perplexing and dazzling product of 19th century stage craft.
Endangered Productions uses a tight translation by May-Brit Akerholt that captures the wit of the work and many of its rhythmic impulses: the rhyming couplets and the more “excursive rhyme schemes … that evoke the wayward impulses, vagrant long and fraying resolve within the protagonist” (Fjelde)
Uncut, the complete play would take several hours. Uncut the music plays for 90 minutes.
This production is structured in two parts. Part the First covers Acts 1, 2 and 3, Part the Second, Acts 4 and 5. The delivery of this multi-faced masterpiece covers its reduced terrain in three hours, while covering excerpts from most of the music that Grieg composed.
This is a heroic undertaking that does the company proud. The sheer scale of resources is staggering. Musicians (27), performers (18) and choristers (18) crowd the unlikely space of the Paddington RSL Club and deliver a cavalcade of acting and singing styles, reflecting the mix of professional and amateur performers.
Peer Gynt is an everyman who doesn’t want to grow up. He is incomplete, unknowing yet yearning for greatness: a funny larrikin who recklessly embraces life. His is a masculinity that avoids engaging with anything that might cause him to reflect on himself and his actions.
The title role is one of the longest in the repertoire and covers a lifetime of shambolic experience, in a structure that subverts classic drama, playing wild with time jumps and locale. Ibsen satirises his telling of tall tales but provides him with a daredevil sense of fractured rebellion, where accountability is shafted and pleasure and profit are the lodestars: avoidance the current to ride.
Philippe Klaus is a tall, gangly youth, with a very boyish voice. He has some magical moments across the evening, but overall, his limited vocal range makes it difficult for him to plot the deepest excesses of the role. His stamina is exemplary.
He is attractively frisky but is not quite capable of executing the earthy sensuality that the role requires. Nor does he age in line with the drama’s sense of ultimate enervation that washes across the homecoming of the ageing Peer in Act 5. He does, however, catch the petulance of the role, notably in Act 5 on the bridge with the Captain, when the basic earthly contentment of the ship’s crew makes his stomach turn and rise with bile.
He is also superb in consort with his Solveig (Emily Turner). The final scene of the work plays with all sorts of imagery and ideas – framing perhaps a Pieta - a soul salved by some kind of mother figure - or the drowning man rescued by eternal women (Goethe’s Ewig Weibliche), or perhaps the exhaustion of masculine ego (potentially a foretaste of our century’s end of the Anthropocene). The lullaby that Solveig draws out so beautifully underpins all these philosophical interactions. This was staged with great finesse. We didn’t necessarily miss the sunrise that Ibsen had planned to greet this reconciliation, though it might have been nice to undercut the last semblance of cloying tenderness with another iteration of the Button Moulder’s words: “Till the last crossroad, Peer/Then we’ll see if …/Till then”.
The emerging discovery that Peer is slated for death, a modest death because of his modest evil, saw Klaus on song, uttering a hushed and husky realisation of his overwhelming masculine failure. What this Peer can’t do, consistently, is bring any depth to the resonant langue that Ibsen and this translation employ. His boyish voice becomes a trail of sing song inflections, bouncing off the rhymes, unable to draw forth any sustained tonal variety. Overall, the close miking employed in this production did not give theatrical resonance to Ibsen’s words.
Solveig is a simple soul – yet her surrender to irrational love is traded on the deep fairy tales that Peer relates, not to her directly, but off stage, via his mother. She surrenders to the web that is spun and its inherent ‘beyond the rainbow’ desire. She waits a lifetime to greet her lover: old and blind. This is a sexually unfulfilled love, a fantasy but an abiding connection bound through her immeasurable longing. She is but a different face of that Gyntian desire.
Turner sang the famous Solveig’s song with clarity and poise, ensuring its melismas were well pitched, underpinned by a sad beauty of expression. Given the size and clarity of her soprano voice it did not need such close and crabby miking. Her chirruping voice in Act 1 established a girlish presence. Ibsen gives the performer limited text to establish this imagined archetype. Her inexorable drift into the dark forest to declare her love for the outlawed Peer was nicely judged.
Elaine Hudson, as Aase was responsible for another highlight of this production. Her death in Act 3 was finally gradated. Her deep clear voice – and clear diction – gave a haunting rending of this famous scene with understated but febrile emotion. Grieg’s music wove its magic under the spoken dialogue as artful melodrama. Her Peer could not quite match her level of engagement and imagination but was a useful partner. Her return in Act 5, like a disembodied somnambulist, was equally touching, and if her skittish uptake of the role in Act 1 was a little too much on the side of a caricature, Ibsen’s writing/characterisation may be more to blame. As Northam notes, “they are misfit survivors of a feckless and bankrupt marriage, with dreams and fantasies their only relief” – rattling around in their derelict cottage.
The first half clipped along in this production. The second half did not flow with such ease and seemed over fussed with production detail – too many props, too much stage setting. The discursive nature of Act 4 can be a particular trap. But Act 5 did provide another stunning highlight. David Kerslake as the Button Moulder gave a beautifully judged performance as death’s messenger. His diction and varied emphasis on words drew us into this potent engagement with death’s tax collector. He played drolly with the bargains that may be struck between this emissary and his pursued. The irony of this exchange, between death and the death-anointed, layered Ibsen’s ideas with sharp humour. Ironic, that the ultimately mediocre life of the teller of tall tales (Peer) ensured that he was not evil enough for hell. Instead, he could be usefully melded down into a recycled life: a shiny button on someone else’s coat. A pity that the Button Moulder’s costume implied a kind of vague circus showman – shafts of lollipop crème and caramel that worked against his gnomic utterances.
Across the production, the design element was hit and miss – as though each bright idea had been latched upon, but never integrated into an overall palette and intent.
Jack Elliot Mitchell played multiple roles with much elan, though his diction at times seemed inhibited by the close miking. His turn as the Troll Courtier was wittily done. His balletic, oleaginous take on The Stranger was arresting, shaping nicely the emerging darkness circling Peer’s soul. With his scientific bent and neoliberal mores, he almost resurfaced the logic of the Peer we encounter in Act 4 (slave trading days, selling of arms to the highest bidder – like a sillier prototype of Andrew Undershaft in Shaw’s Major Barbara). Ibsen’s collage of characters often seems to arise from Peer’s unsettled psyche.
The Stranger’s white top hat and tails was startling – intended to be incongruous – but like the Button Moulder it left us unsure of the actual realm he hailed from: vaudeville, Hollywood, the circus? The costume choice for Mitchell’s appearance as the Thin Man seemed more apposite – darker, more sinister - though this scene was so cut, one was unsure why this remnant was included.
Alan Faulkner at the Troll King gave us a droll downbeat interpretation that worked, but somehow missed the energy of the character’s philosophy and power. Likewise, his reappearance in Act 5 carried forward this doleful riff – perfectly acceptable, but maybe not the whole character.
Unfortunately, the voice of the Boyg did not inspire any frisson – though Peer’s response to this deep masculine Id (a demi-god?) was craftily pitched by Klaus, somewhat redeeming the scene.
The Three Herd Girls felt more like the witches of Macbeth than lusty women folk caught in the landscape (no man’s land) between trolls and humans. The insecure pitch of the singing gave a sour taste to this piquant interlude.
Some of the staging was low level community theatre. The shipwreck scene and drowning of the Cook by Peer did not make much of an impact – sabotaged by a very wan rendition of a dark floating rippled cloth as a shoddy seascape. Likewise, the instantiation of the various spirits that Peer must deal with – yarn balls, sighs of the air etc – did not add to the mood and intensity of this scene: writhing bodies within cloth sacks look dolefully silly.
The orchestra conducted by Peter Alexander conjured up some impressive soundscapes, though the intonation of the small contingent of violins was somewhat suspect, and the excessive amplification of the orchestral sounds gave it a boom and bust that rendered away the natural acoustics - to achieve a somewhat boxy ambience. The attack of the players was exemplary. It was good to hear some of the more unfamiliar music and see how it fitted in or enhanced the work’s dramatic trajectory. Congratulations to Alexander who arranged all the pieces. The solo violin of Fiona Ziegler as the wedding fiddler was particularly tangy. The deft instrumentation underpinning Solveig’s arias was well realised by this band, while the full orchestral crescendos were pitched with rigour and force.
The chorus interventions (Coro Austral) were particularly poignant in the final act, creating a much welcome frisson, lead with finesse by Margo Mclaughlin. Unfortunately, their placement within the auditorium didn’t always help with diction.
The Director, Christine Logan, has assembled and guided a very large cast of professionals and amateurs with a sure hand. She goes from strength to strength in her entrepreneurial and artistic endeavours.
In terms of an integrated design, the feebleness of the projections undercut some of their inherent visual power. The small projection space – the leakage of the conductor’s rostrum light - did not enhance their intent. Lighting malfunctions on the night meant that most of Part 1 was seen through a mottled prism – a reasonable metaphor for Peer’s dreamworld but the performance almost became a radio play, so dim were tableau and costumes. Lighting was vastly superior in the second half.
The grunting trolls were great fun, though dark lighting made it difficult to discern their actual dress. The child actors were enthusiastic little trolls.
The show’s choreography was somewhat bland, though the production did try to differentiate between the wild cavorting of the pregnant Green Woman and the swirling fluid arms of Anitra (Katherine Munro). Costuming and staging could not effectively instantiate the gross ageing of the Women in Green, who comes to menace and haunt the banished Peer, unlike Ed Suttle who was suitably blemished and brattish as Peer’s oversize troll son, Bugbear.
Sightlines in the venue were variable, the vocal interruptions via the raffle call from the RSL proper were tolerably humorous diversions – though not some of the sound system interference that squawked now and then.
This extraordinary combination of the combined genius of Ibsen and Grieg has never been attempted in Australia. That this once is a lifetime event was undertaken by a semi-professional theatre company – a charity in effect - committed to the production of neglected music theatre gems, is testament to the power of theatre and music and volunteer effort to create a memorable experience. Four performances only, given the enormous cost even with lots of volunteers on hand. Might other larger and well-funded companies take up the challenge of this monumental a piece of music theatre? I doubt it. So, the not-for-profit sector deserves our fulsome thanks.
Endangered Production, Paddington RSL Club, Sydney, July 1, 2022
Declaration: the reviewer has personal connections with some of the cast and crew.
Gar Jones
It is a poetic drama that demands amazing scenic effects. It rides on gigantic leaps of imagination. It is modern (or Shakespearean) in its confounding complexity and its ramshackle narrative. The older Ibsen called it “wild and formless, recklessly written”. Its deep symbolism and earthiness, its ancient folk roots and its cosmopolitan edge make it a perplexing and dazzling product of 19th century stage craft.
Endangered Productions uses a tight translation by May-Brit Akerholt that captures the wit of the work and many of its rhythmic impulses: the rhyming couplets and the more “excursive rhyme schemes … that evoke the wayward impulses, vagrant long and fraying resolve within the protagonist” (Fjelde)
Uncut, the complete play would take several hours. Uncut the music plays for 90 minutes.
This production is structured in two parts. Part the First covers Acts 1, 2 and 3, Part the Second, Acts 4 and 5. The delivery of this multi-faced masterpiece covers its reduced terrain in three hours, while covering excerpts from most of the music that Grieg composed.
This is a heroic undertaking that does the company proud. The sheer scale of resources is staggering. Musicians (27), performers (18) and choristers (18) crowd the unlikely space of the Paddington RSL Club and deliver a cavalcade of acting and singing styles, reflecting the mix of professional and amateur performers.
Peer Gynt is an everyman who doesn’t want to grow up. He is incomplete, unknowing yet yearning for greatness: a funny larrikin who recklessly embraces life. His is a masculinity that avoids engaging with anything that might cause him to reflect on himself and his actions.
The title role is one of the longest in the repertoire and covers a lifetime of shambolic experience, in a structure that subverts classic drama, playing wild with time jumps and locale. Ibsen satirises his telling of tall tales but provides him with a daredevil sense of fractured rebellion, where accountability is shafted and pleasure and profit are the lodestars: avoidance the current to ride.
Philippe Klaus is a tall, gangly youth, with a very boyish voice. He has some magical moments across the evening, but overall, his limited vocal range makes it difficult for him to plot the deepest excesses of the role. His stamina is exemplary.
He is attractively frisky but is not quite capable of executing the earthy sensuality that the role requires. Nor does he age in line with the drama’s sense of ultimate enervation that washes across the homecoming of the ageing Peer in Act 5. He does, however, catch the petulance of the role, notably in Act 5 on the bridge with the Captain, when the basic earthly contentment of the ship’s crew makes his stomach turn and rise with bile.
He is also superb in consort with his Solveig (Emily Turner). The final scene of the work plays with all sorts of imagery and ideas – framing perhaps a Pieta - a soul salved by some kind of mother figure - or the drowning man rescued by eternal women (Goethe’s Ewig Weibliche), or perhaps the exhaustion of masculine ego (potentially a foretaste of our century’s end of the Anthropocene). The lullaby that Solveig draws out so beautifully underpins all these philosophical interactions. This was staged with great finesse. We didn’t necessarily miss the sunrise that Ibsen had planned to greet this reconciliation, though it might have been nice to undercut the last semblance of cloying tenderness with another iteration of the Button Moulder’s words: “Till the last crossroad, Peer/Then we’ll see if …/Till then”.
The emerging discovery that Peer is slated for death, a modest death because of his modest evil, saw Klaus on song, uttering a hushed and husky realisation of his overwhelming masculine failure. What this Peer can’t do, consistently, is bring any depth to the resonant langue that Ibsen and this translation employ. His boyish voice becomes a trail of sing song inflections, bouncing off the rhymes, unable to draw forth any sustained tonal variety. Overall, the close miking employed in this production did not give theatrical resonance to Ibsen’s words.
Solveig is a simple soul – yet her surrender to irrational love is traded on the deep fairy tales that Peer relates, not to her directly, but off stage, via his mother. She surrenders to the web that is spun and its inherent ‘beyond the rainbow’ desire. She waits a lifetime to greet her lover: old and blind. This is a sexually unfulfilled love, a fantasy but an abiding connection bound through her immeasurable longing. She is but a different face of that Gyntian desire.
Turner sang the famous Solveig’s song with clarity and poise, ensuring its melismas were well pitched, underpinned by a sad beauty of expression. Given the size and clarity of her soprano voice it did not need such close and crabby miking. Her chirruping voice in Act 1 established a girlish presence. Ibsen gives the performer limited text to establish this imagined archetype. Her inexorable drift into the dark forest to declare her love for the outlawed Peer was nicely judged.
Elaine Hudson, as Aase was responsible for another highlight of this production. Her death in Act 3 was finally gradated. Her deep clear voice – and clear diction – gave a haunting rending of this famous scene with understated but febrile emotion. Grieg’s music wove its magic under the spoken dialogue as artful melodrama. Her Peer could not quite match her level of engagement and imagination but was a useful partner. Her return in Act 5, like a disembodied somnambulist, was equally touching, and if her skittish uptake of the role in Act 1 was a little too much on the side of a caricature, Ibsen’s writing/characterisation may be more to blame. As Northam notes, “they are misfit survivors of a feckless and bankrupt marriage, with dreams and fantasies their only relief” – rattling around in their derelict cottage.
The first half clipped along in this production. The second half did not flow with such ease and seemed over fussed with production detail – too many props, too much stage setting. The discursive nature of Act 4 can be a particular trap. But Act 5 did provide another stunning highlight. David Kerslake as the Button Moulder gave a beautifully judged performance as death’s messenger. His diction and varied emphasis on words drew us into this potent engagement with death’s tax collector. He played drolly with the bargains that may be struck between this emissary and his pursued. The irony of this exchange, between death and the death-anointed, layered Ibsen’s ideas with sharp humour. Ironic, that the ultimately mediocre life of the teller of tall tales (Peer) ensured that he was not evil enough for hell. Instead, he could be usefully melded down into a recycled life: a shiny button on someone else’s coat. A pity that the Button Moulder’s costume implied a kind of vague circus showman – shafts of lollipop crème and caramel that worked against his gnomic utterances.
Across the production, the design element was hit and miss – as though each bright idea had been latched upon, but never integrated into an overall palette and intent.
Jack Elliot Mitchell played multiple roles with much elan, though his diction at times seemed inhibited by the close miking. His turn as the Troll Courtier was wittily done. His balletic, oleaginous take on The Stranger was arresting, shaping nicely the emerging darkness circling Peer’s soul. With his scientific bent and neoliberal mores, he almost resurfaced the logic of the Peer we encounter in Act 4 (slave trading days, selling of arms to the highest bidder – like a sillier prototype of Andrew Undershaft in Shaw’s Major Barbara). Ibsen’s collage of characters often seems to arise from Peer’s unsettled psyche.
The Stranger’s white top hat and tails was startling – intended to be incongruous – but like the Button Moulder it left us unsure of the actual realm he hailed from: vaudeville, Hollywood, the circus? The costume choice for Mitchell’s appearance as the Thin Man seemed more apposite – darker, more sinister - though this scene was so cut, one was unsure why this remnant was included.
Alan Faulkner at the Troll King gave us a droll downbeat interpretation that worked, but somehow missed the energy of the character’s philosophy and power. Likewise, his reappearance in Act 5 carried forward this doleful riff – perfectly acceptable, but maybe not the whole character.
Unfortunately, the voice of the Boyg did not inspire any frisson – though Peer’s response to this deep masculine Id (a demi-god?) was craftily pitched by Klaus, somewhat redeeming the scene.
The Three Herd Girls felt more like the witches of Macbeth than lusty women folk caught in the landscape (no man’s land) between trolls and humans. The insecure pitch of the singing gave a sour taste to this piquant interlude.
Some of the staging was low level community theatre. The shipwreck scene and drowning of the Cook by Peer did not make much of an impact – sabotaged by a very wan rendition of a dark floating rippled cloth as a shoddy seascape. Likewise, the instantiation of the various spirits that Peer must deal with – yarn balls, sighs of the air etc – did not add to the mood and intensity of this scene: writhing bodies within cloth sacks look dolefully silly.
The orchestra conducted by Peter Alexander conjured up some impressive soundscapes, though the intonation of the small contingent of violins was somewhat suspect, and the excessive amplification of the orchestral sounds gave it a boom and bust that rendered away the natural acoustics - to achieve a somewhat boxy ambience. The attack of the players was exemplary. It was good to hear some of the more unfamiliar music and see how it fitted in or enhanced the work’s dramatic trajectory. Congratulations to Alexander who arranged all the pieces. The solo violin of Fiona Ziegler as the wedding fiddler was particularly tangy. The deft instrumentation underpinning Solveig’s arias was well realised by this band, while the full orchestral crescendos were pitched with rigour and force.
The chorus interventions (Coro Austral) were particularly poignant in the final act, creating a much welcome frisson, lead with finesse by Margo Mclaughlin. Unfortunately, their placement within the auditorium didn’t always help with diction.
The Director, Christine Logan, has assembled and guided a very large cast of professionals and amateurs with a sure hand. She goes from strength to strength in her entrepreneurial and artistic endeavours.
In terms of an integrated design, the feebleness of the projections undercut some of their inherent visual power. The small projection space – the leakage of the conductor’s rostrum light - did not enhance their intent. Lighting malfunctions on the night meant that most of Part 1 was seen through a mottled prism – a reasonable metaphor for Peer’s dreamworld but the performance almost became a radio play, so dim were tableau and costumes. Lighting was vastly superior in the second half.
The grunting trolls were great fun, though dark lighting made it difficult to discern their actual dress. The child actors were enthusiastic little trolls.
The show’s choreography was somewhat bland, though the production did try to differentiate between the wild cavorting of the pregnant Green Woman and the swirling fluid arms of Anitra (Katherine Munro). Costuming and staging could not effectively instantiate the gross ageing of the Women in Green, who comes to menace and haunt the banished Peer, unlike Ed Suttle who was suitably blemished and brattish as Peer’s oversize troll son, Bugbear.
Sightlines in the venue were variable, the vocal interruptions via the raffle call from the RSL proper were tolerably humorous diversions – though not some of the sound system interference that squawked now and then.
This extraordinary combination of the combined genius of Ibsen and Grieg has never been attempted in Australia. That this once is a lifetime event was undertaken by a semi-professional theatre company – a charity in effect - committed to the production of neglected music theatre gems, is testament to the power of theatre and music and volunteer effort to create a memorable experience. Four performances only, given the enormous cost even with lots of volunteers on hand. Might other larger and well-funded companies take up the challenge of this monumental a piece of music theatre? I doubt it. So, the not-for-profit sector deserves our fulsome thanks.
Endangered Production, Paddington RSL Club, Sydney, July 1, 2022
Declaration: the reviewer has personal connections with some of the cast and crew.
Gar Jones
