Play: Peer Gynt

Overview
Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867) is a verse drama that follows the lifelong wanderings of a charming, irresponsible braggart who pursues freedom and self-fulfillment but keeps slipping away from responsibility. Rooted in Norwegian folklore yet expansive in scope, the play blends satire, fantasy, and spiritual quest, tracing Peer's journey from a mountain village to deserts and madhouses, and back home, where the price of evasion must be paid.

Plot
In rural Norway, Peer Gynt entertains and exasperates his widowed mother Aase with tall tales of heroism. He crashes the wedding of Ingrid, abducts her in a burst of bravado, then abandons her just as rashly. Fleeing into the mountains, he encounters the troll world in the hall of the Dovre King and is tempted to become a troll by marrying the Green-Clad Woman. The troll motto, “Troll, to thyself be enough”, flatters his self-centeredness, but the price, including a tail and a warped way of seeing, repels him. Confronted by the formless Boyg, a shapeless power whose counsel is “Go roundabout,” Peer learns the evasive strategy that will define his life.

Back among humans, Peer meets Solveig, a pure-hearted girl who loves him without condition. He builds a hut in the forest, and she comes to share his life. When the Green-Clad Woman claims him and hints at a troll child, Peer panics and slips away, sparing Solveig the shame he has caused but also renouncing the commitment that might have anchored him. Aase’s death, imagined by Peer as a tender sleigh ride to the gates of heaven, leaves him untethered, and he heads abroad.

Years pass. Peer becomes a cosmopolitan opportunist: speculator, slave trader, adventurer. In North Africa he parades wealth and vanity, is flattered by courtiers, and seduced and robbed by the Bedouin girl Anitra. In the Cairo madhouse he is proclaimed Emperor by lunatics who worship their own delusions, a grotesque mirror of his “Gyntian” creed of self-sufficiency. Growing old, he sets sail for home; his ship wrecks, and a sinister passenger, the Lean One, hovers like the Devil, hinting at judgment.

Back in Norway, Peer meets the Button Moulder, a cosmic functionary tasked with melting souls that were neither good nor evil into the common mass. Peer, who has been “himself” in a shallow, shifting way, is told he lacks a true self: he lived by dodging, not choosing. Given one chance to prove otherwise, he seeks a witness to his authentic identity. He revisits the troll world, his youthful haunts, and the Boyg’s emptiness, and finds only evasions returned to him. Finally, he comes to Solveig, now elderly, still waiting and singing. When he asks where his true self has been, she answers: “In my faith, in my hope, in my love.” The Button Moulder recedes; salvation remains ambiguous but possible.

Characters and motifs
Peer is a visionary and a fabulist whose imagination liberates and sabotages him. Aase embodies maternal love and earthy humor. Solveig personifies steadfast grace. The troll king and the Boyg caricature self-enclosure and avoidance. The Button Moulder frames the existential audit: was there a core, or only masks?

Themes
Identity tested against responsibility; the seductions of fantasy versus the demands of love; national folklore refracted through modern skepticism. Ibsen skewers romantic individualism by showing how “being oneself” curdles into narcissism when severed from truth and community. The notion of “going roundabout” becomes a spiritual disease; Solveig’s constancy suggests that fidelity can redeem what bravado cannot.

Form and legacy
Written as a poetic “dramatic poem” and later staged with Edvard Grieg’s iconic incidental music, Peer Gynt moves from realistic scenes to dreamlike tableaux across five acts. Its blend of satire, myth, and metaphysical inquiry has made it a touchstone for modern drama and a lasting examination of the self that runs from the world it longs to conquer.