Peter Gynt
National Theatre, London

YOU can see what David Hare is doing with this new take on Ibsen’s extraordinary epic Peer Gynt. He uses it for his own satirical purposes and, in part, it works.

This odyssey with a difference charts the progress of one Peter Gynt as he journeys from youth to old age and from home to foreign shores. But the play hinges not on where he goes or on the people he meets so much as on the inner workings of his compulsive mind.

For Peter is the victim of his own imagination. His rampant brain turns all experience into wild, heroic fantasy and, at the centre of every illusion is Peter himself, the epitome of an egocentric man who blurs all distinction between the real and the imagined.

From war hero to millionaire mogul, from God-seeker to guru and from womaniser to perfect son, he stars in every movie of his life only to realise in the end – and too late – that it’s all been folly. Life and its meaning, he learns, can only be found outside the self-seeking impulses of his insistent brain.

It’s a moral tale which in Ibsen’s hands is a profound reflection on the human ego and a prophetic, modernistic perception of the human brain.

What Hare adds is a currency of setting and a popular take on contemporary mores. Instead of the Norwegian Gudbrand Valley and the pine forests, Peter hails from the wilds of Scotland. At the height of his wealth we see him in the Florida of Donald Trump and when he dabbles in international conflict, it’s the relations between Shias and Sunnis that are at stake.

Political satire is Hare’s home territory, the timeless precision of myth and legend less so. And somewhere there is an unease between the styles and motives of the two writers, as if one squats on the other.

Not that it isn’t fun and there is much to enjoy in this parody of capitalism and self-promotion gone mad. But it still feels like a comic layer over the original play’s profundity and when Peter weeps as his mother dies and faces his own life’s denouement with sudden clarity, the modern references, though pertinent, seem to limit the universality of the piece.

A versatile cast give us trolls and two-headed boys and weird and wonderful creatures of myth and legend. But it’s James McArdle’s towering performance as Peter and Richard Hudson’s breathtaking sets that distinguish Jonathan Kent’s production and let the imagination soar.

Long and uneven, with an at times confusing clash of authorship and resolutely male-centric, this production’s nevertheless something of a mind-bender.

Runs until October 8, box office: nationaltheatre.org.uk