Interview with Robert Wilson,
director of Peer Gynt
Interview by Stan Schwartz
SS: How did you come to be involved in this production
of
Peer Gynt and what about the play attracted you?
RW: I have been interested in Ibsen for a long
time. I did productions of
When We Dead Awaken and
The
Lady From the Sea in the 1990s. I was fascinated by his particular
brand of modernism, which can be psychological and very stylized
at the same time. I had also never worked in Norway, so when I
was asked to do
Peer Gynt in Ibsen's home country, I
felt honored and challenged at the same time. For the Norwegians
to ask an American director to produce one of their national literary
treasures seemed such an extraordinary gesture, especially in
the context of the centennials of Ibsen's death and the celebrations
for 100 years of Norwegian independence as a national state.
SS: Given that any production of
Peer Gynt must
be cut to a manageable size, did you work with Jon Fosse—himself
an internationally known playwright—on the text, or was
the translation handed to you as a fait accomplit?
RW: I am not a writer, I am a director. It would have
been a lack of respect to meddle with such an accomplished writer
like Jon, writing in his native language, especially since I do
not speak Norwegian. Of course there were contacts, but what I
am most interested in is structure. I took Jon's text and staged
it the way I felt represented the structure of Peer's story.
SS: One critic I read saw this particular Peer
as your alter ego, which led me to wonder: what aspects of yourself
do you see in the character of Peer?
RW: I would hope I am not that incorrigible!
But one thing that interests me in
Peer Gynt is that there is
a lot of repetition in his actions. He fails, he tries again.
He succeeds, he tries yet again. Then he fails again. That is
his integrity, if anything: he does what he does, over and over
again in widely different settings.
SS: Peer Gynt strings together a number of different
stylistic modes: rustic folk tale, fantasy, satire, morality play,
existential inquiry. As a director, how do you approach such genre-jumping
in order to achieve stylistic consistency and coherence?
RW: I do not believe in a strict separation of
these genres. Life mixes very different approaches and experiences,
often in the same day. Who says slapstick cannot be existential
inquiry? The two are often very close. I like to emphasize different
aspects within one work. What you call genre-jumping sounds like
part of our daily existence to me. And all of them have their
place. So I felt I could play up all these different aspects.
Coherence comes through structure, through a certain approach
to create a space for the characters with light, through a specific
way of movement and gesture.
SS: Peer's journey embodies many internal and
external anxieties, but ultimately, Peer finds what seems to be
a traditional kind of redemption through love, i.e., a seemingly
happy ending. How optimistically do you read the play's final
moments?
RW: The happy ending is yet another genre, another weapon
in Ibsen's stylistic armory. Peer recognizes the one-time presence
of goodness in his life. That does not change everything he did
wrong. But it is the realization of a kind of truth. And finding
this truth among his misdeeds, his deceptions, his cruelty is
not a negative ending. He has asked what it means to be alive,
and he has received a partial answer from his youth. That has
to count for something, even if his life has since moved on in
unexpected directions.