New production

In an English Version by Irina Brook (* 1963)

With German surtitles

LEADING TEAM

Irina Brook, Stage Director
Noëlle Ginefri, Stage Design
Magali Castellan, Costume Design
Guillaume Antonini, Conductor
Arnaud Jung, Lighting Design
Geoffrey Carey, Assistant Director

CAST

With Guillaume Antonini, Helene Arntzen, Froydis Arntzen Dale, Diego Asensio, Anne-Emmanuelle Davy, Jerry Di Giacomo, Scott Koehler, Mireille Maalouf, Roméo Monteiro, Christophe Rodomisto, Augustin Ruhabura, Ingvar E. Sigurdsson, Gen Shimaoka and Shantala Shivalingappa.

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

Irina Brook’s nationality is the theatre. An artist who is equally at home in theatres on both sides of the Atlantic, who has directed at the Théâtre du Soleil and the Avignon Festival and won France’s most distinguished directing award, the Prix Molière, yet whose first language is English, she finds moving between languages, cultures and theatrical forms as natural as breathing.
She was born into a theatre family. This in itself is not ­particularly unusual for successful theatremakers, but the theatre family Irina Brook was born into (she is the daughter of director Peter Brook and actress Natasha Parry) is rather special and highly cosmopolitan. Irina Brook’s approach to her father’s legacy is refreshingly uncomplicated. She has had no inhibitions about tackling the same plays as her father and on those occasions when she has done so – such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Tempest – the results have been strikingly different.
Irina Brook will create a new English language production of Peer Gynt specially for the Salzburg Festival with a typically international ensemble from a diverse range of performance backgrounds.
Irina Brook will create a new English language production of Peer Gynt specially for the Salzburg Festival with a typically international ensemble from a diverse range of performance backgrounds.
Peer Gynt follows its eponymous hero all around the world and back home again, from callow youth to old age. Though written for publication as a dramatic poem with little thought given to the practicalities of stage performance, Ibsen’s first masterpiece offers a wealth of rich dramatic material as Peer’s impulsive behaviour and relentless appetites propel him headlong through a succession of domestic and mythical worlds, through hallucinations and madness, through scenes of love and death and trolls. Drawing on a number of traditional Norwegian folk tales, Ibsen’s portrayal of this larger than life figure transcended his at times savage critique of a national character to become one of the seminal narratives of the 19^th century: of travel, colonization and commercial ingenuity – and of the soulless individualism behind it…

David Tushingham