Peer Gynt

"Peer, you're lying!": Henrik Ibsen's first sentence of his "dramatic poem", which premiered in 1876, already sets out the central theme of his work: Peer Gynt's mother Aase, who despairs of her son and yet loves him unconditionally, utters it. And Peer replies: "I don't do that!" But he does. And as charming as this initially youthful braggart Peer Gynt may appear at first, in the course of this epic drama and Peer's journey through life, he reveals himself time and again and increasingly as an uninhibited egotist and narcissist. He rebels against the narrowness of rural Norway and repeatedly tries to escape it and the precarious circumstances caused by his father's addiction to drink and ostentation: first in his fertile imagination, then in reality on adventurous journeys that take him halfway around the world. Time and again, this self-absorbed man reinvents himself as a cosmopolitan, capitalist, colonialist and emperor. Traveling through outer and inner, real and fantastic worlds, he spends his entire life searching for his true self, the "Gyntian self". But will he ever find his core on this odyssey or is he like an onion of which nothing remains after layer after layer has been removed? Israeli director Yair Sherman and his team will bring Henrik Ibsen's exuberant work, in which highly personal fears and experiences mingle with Norwegian fairy tales and myths as well as the real course of the world in the 19th century, to the stage of the Großes Haus: Following his acclaimed, visually stunning production of Shakespeare's WINTER'S TALE, you can once again expect great epic material, grand images and seductive theatrical magic. Yair Sherman stages Ibsen's study of a narcissist whose unscrupulous self-realization may cause him to miss out on happiness in life with a dozen "peers" who take turns in this ensemble piece: isn't there a "Peer Gynt" in all of us?