When I was 18, I was living a rock and roll dream in New York. I was a waitress in a café and I was studying drama. I was meeting musicians like Iggy Pop and David Bowie. I had a revelation when I read Peer Gynt for the very first time: I was captivated by this classic that was so delirious, so poetic, and strikingly modern. And I began to imagine (I was not a director at the time) a musical version with Iggy Pop as Peer Gynt and David Bowie as the troll king.
Fast-forward, thirty years later, I am asked to put on a show for the Salzburg Festival. I take up the play that I have not read since. Same shock. I rediscover an incredible adventure story, written freely, like a film script. It tells the epic of an ambitious and selfish young man who dreams of glory, pursues women, drinks to excess, abandons his beloved mother, sells his soul to the king of the trolls. Only Solveig remains faithful and pure out of love for him. She promises to wait for him…
Through this headlong rush, Peer constantly struggles with the leitmotif of “who am I?” Although he has made a fortune and seems to have managed to forget his origins and fulfil his ambitions, he is relentlessly haunted by painful questions: “What is the ego?”, “Where is the real me?” Liar, dreamer, poet. Insolent and nonconformist, seductive, cowardly and irresponsible, Peer Gynt remains for everyone, but especially for himself, an insoluble enigma.
When rereading Ibsen’s text, I found my first impulse and so I made Peer Gynt a young musician-singer, who manages to leave his native village, leaving everyone in his path to become a star, a rocker in the tradition of Iggy Pop, in an imaginary theatrical universe, a sort of downtown New York. I assembled a multicultural and multidisciplinary cast: actors, dancers, singers, musicians. The Indian dancer Shantala Shivalingappa plays the faithful Solveig. The greatest of Icelandic actors, Ingvar Sigurdsson, embodies Peer Gynt.
A group of musicians forms the basis of the narration, accompanying new texts and poems by Sam Shepard written for the occasion for Peer’s monologues. Iggy Pop contributed to this adventure by composing two new songs for the show.
Ibsen’s masterpiece offers a unique theatrical richness. It allows me to share with you not only one of the greatest classics of the repertoire, but also a story accessible to all, a philosophical and existential questioning, in the form of a timeless fairy tale.
