Peer Gynt House. In 2006, as part of the Norwegian Ibsen anniversary festival, "Peer Gynt" was set at the foot of the Great Sphinx of Giza near Cairo, Egypt (an important location in the original play). The director was Bentein Baardson. The performance was the centre of some controversy, with some critics seeing it as a display of colonialist attitudes. In January 2008 the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis debuted a new translation of "Peer Gynt" by the poet Robert Bly. Bly learned Norwegian from his grandparents while growing up in rural Minnesota, and later during several years of travel in Norway. This
Peer Gynt lovers – the deeply committed Solveig and the superficial Peer, who is more a surface for projections than a coherent character. The simplest conclusion one may draw from "Peer Gynt", is expressed in the eloquent prose of the author: “"If you lie; are you real?"” The literary critic Harold Bloom of New York University in his book "The Western Canon" has challenged the conventional reading of "Peer Gynt", stating:Far more than Goethe's Faust, Peer is the one nineteenth-century literary character who has the largeness of the grandest characters of Renaissance imaginings. Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Hugo, even Balzac have no single