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 Gynt represents the superior Germanic hero, struggling against implicitly Jewish "trolls". Ralph M. Engelman says, "Eckart meant his adaptation of Peer Gynt to represent a racial allegory in which the trolls and Great Boyg represented what [Otto] Weininger conceived to be the Jewish spirit." Eckart's version was one of the best attended productions of the age with more than 600 performances in Berlin alone. Eckart later helped to found the Nazi party. In 1938 German composer Werner Egk finished an opera based on the story. In 1948, the composer Harald Sæverud made a new score for the nynorsk-production at "the