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 the Button Molder. In 1951, John Garfield fulfilled his wish to star in a Broadway production, featuring Mildred Dunnock as Åse. Sadly, this production was not a success, and is said by some to have contributed to Garfield's death at age 39. On film, years before he became a superstar, the seventeen-year-old Charlton Heston starred as Peer in a silent, student-made, low-budget film version of the play produced in 1941. "Peer Gynt", however, has never been given a full-blown treatment as a sound film in English on the motion picture screen, although there have been several television productions, and a