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 Hegel, his publisher, with his plan for the play: it would be "a long dramatic poem, having as its principal a part-legendary, part-fictional character from Norwegian folklore during "recent" times. It will bear no resemblance to "Brand", and will contain no direct polemics or anything of that kind." He began to write "Peer Gynt" on 14 January, employing a far greater variety of metres in its rhymed verse than he had used in his previous verse plays "Brand" (written 1865) or "Love's Comedy" (written 1862). The first two acts were completed in Rome and the third in Casamicciola on the