FringeReview UK 2026
The Story of Peer Gynt
The Norwegian Ibsen Company
Genre: Adaptation, Classical and Shakespeare, Drama, European Theatre, International, Mainstream Theatre, Poetry-Based Theatre, Short Plays, Solo Performance, Theatre, Translation
Venue: The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
The Norwegian Ibsen Company return with this pared-down voyage round Peer Gynt as he voyages away from himself. Adapted by Elisabeth Gording and Kåre Conradi, and directed by him at the Coronet it runs three days till February 21.
The Norwegian Ibsen company – and here Conradi – are doing for Ibsen what Conor Lovett and Gare St Lazare are doing for Beckett. And both are to be found at the Coronet.
Review
A hollow circlet, a cusp of lyrical nothingness hedges Ibsen’s most flamboyant character, Peer Gynt. So how apt the Coronet stage with its liminal blank oval should host Norwegian star Kåre Conradi’s one-man dramatised lecture (as it’s billed) as he circles round The Story of Peer Gynt: An Evening With Kåre Conradi. The Norwegian Ibsen Company return with this pared-down voyage round Gynt as he voyages away from himself. Adapted by Elisabeth Gording and Conradi, and directed by him at the Coronet it runs three days till February 21.
Since discovering the play at 17, actor Conradi has enjoyed an intense connection with Peer Gynt. In nearly 80 minutes (Peer-like he claims 67, but who’s counting?), he sashays between storyteller, critic, badinageur and the feckless Peer himself to shed what appears here as a blue-green lightning on Ibsen’s 1867 play. Conradi’s wittily placing himself as both storyteller on a supreme storyteller; and telling us Ibsen’s language and techniques slant.
One-person shows – often with a single prop like this chair – are a tradition on this magical stage. Lighting and movement are sparing and the more telling when deployed. A blue-grey nimbus arises over a hunched Conradi. Peer Gynt though published in verse in 1867 was never intended for performance yet staged in 1875 it made Ibsen’s famous internationally. Yet he was already 11 years into his exile, and like Peer wouldn’t return to Norway till 1891, when he was 63.
Conradi’s hunched in the chair: a halo of light sculpts his hair. Initially Peer’s mother pronounces from the depth of her disappointment in him. Then the sun appears. Conradi’s face is bathed in light as he looks up and the wild gamut of his feckless charm launches across the blue-green stage with sudden (but very soaring) shafts of light.
Conradi’s English is idiomatic (he trained at LAMDA first). So when he breaks into the glottals and aspirates of Norwegian it’s as startling as if he were speaking Trollish but a tongue of infinitely subtle clicks and poetry. Though as Conradi guesses there’s Norwegians present (as always at the Coronet on such occasions), no one hearing Peer Gynt in Norwegian for the first time will forget its heady vigour and poetry, shaded in consonants. In Conradi’s voice the seductive array of Ibsen’s seducer is intoxicating. Conradi is also very funny. He continually skips into an aside where he promises to make it ten minutes longer if anyone laughs. In fact it does last nearer 80 than the 70 minutes billed. Who’s counting the laughs?
There’s narrative details we forget, or elided in performance if not translations. Conradi in his English commentaries references Peter Watts whom he respects and the way he manages to render Norwegian.
So it’s both a commentary or gloss in the text and a staging of the play in snatches of lightning. Conradi naturally and superbly inhabits characters as diverse as Peer’s mother and the Button Moulder, Ingrid or the Troll King, the drowning Cook or the Devil, Amytra or Solveig.
Conradi has a particular gift for invoking near the top if his vocal range in a kind of stage whisper that’s also sung. On one occasion only he comes downstage to perch at the edge. Equally he goes upstage just once on Peer’s return to Norway, in a shaft of bleak unforgiving light. Gestures aren’t minimal but they are contained, sculpting the language and not flinging it to the air. Too often.
The moral force of Ibsen’s first international hit (if we leave Brand from 1866 aside) is explained linguistically. The distinction of “to thyself be true” as Polonius counsels, as opposed to the Trollish “to thyself be enough” to get by in ego and with nothing to show. So the gloss becomes something of a performative lit-crit too, so engagingly done you feel nourished and not lectured at.
The best though is the last. Musically we’ve been sparingly treated to Ole Bull’s ‘In Solitude’ melody recorded by Arve Tellefsen. But now Conradi sings Solveig’s sing with heartbreaking eloquence. It’s almost too much and quite rending.
So it might be boring to report the Coronet, house of international magic has scored another five-star meteor blazing for three nights over a dusk-blue stage and straight-backed chair. It doesn’t make it any the less true. The Norwegian Ibsen company – and here Conradi – are doing for Ibsen what Conor Lovett and Gare St Lazare are doing for Beckett. If very differently. And as ever both are to be found at the Coronet.
Adaptation: Elisabeth Gording and Kåre Conradi, Director: Kåre Conradi, Actor: Kåre Conradi, Light Design: Anders Busch, Music: In solitude by Ole Bull – recorded by Arve Tellefsen, Producer: André Moi Danielsen.
