Peer Gynt birthplace, where Ibsen claims he found inspiration for the character "Peer Gynt", and is regarded by many as the most authentic version. The play is performed by professional actors from the national theater institutions, and nearly 80 local amateur actors. The music to the play is inspired by the original theatre music by Edvard Grieg - the "Peer Gynt suite". The play is one of the most popular theater productions in Norway, attracting more than 12,000 people every summer. The festival also holds the Peer Gynt Prize, which is a national Norwegian honor prize given to a person or institution
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