A new look on Peer Gynt: HarrisonParrott brings Waiting to Strasbourg

Mari Eriksmoen
04_FB_WEB_size_EIVIND_GULLBERG_JENSEN_by_michal_šebeňa_©

A new look on Peer Gynt: HarrisonParrott brings Waiting to Strasbourg

15/9/2020

The theme of Waiting is the inescapable of the loneliness of the human being, and the little details and stories that make up our existence. When I staged Peer Gynt and some years later the opera Hanjo I was totally fascinated by two female characters: Solveig and Hanako, a geisha, both of them abandoned by a man and in an eternal wait. I was intrigued by their disappointment, their despair, their love and tenacity, and by the deep perseverance of the two women. The idea for this production was born many years ago and out of infinite love for these two characters, these two real people of flesh and blood in my mind’

Calixto Bieito

The basis was the character of Solveig in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, the one who does not journey out, but who remains. Solveig is self-extinguishing, she lives for others, something we usually think of as passive, while the man she is waiting for, the one who journeys out, is active. But she is the one who is giving – while he takes. What does it mean to give? What does it mean to wait? What does this do to our way of being in the world? Based on these questions I wrote a story about three generations of women in our time’.

Karl Ove Knausgård