“General” Front & Back - the Royal Exchange Theatre

The Director
For director Braham Murray the
key to Peer Gynt lies in uncovering
what he calls Peer’s ‘individuation
process’, the discovery of the real
self which lies deep inside him.
As Braham
explains: “From the age of seven
you begin to realise you are
someone separate and you have
to find out who you really are.
Initially you accept
everything your
parents bring you
up to believe. But
eventually you
begin to realise
that you are
someone quite
different: that you
have all kinds of
sides to yourself.
You have dark
sides, you have desires,
you have instincts. The
individuation process is trying
to understand as much of
yourself as you can, bringing it
into your consciousness, blessing
it and becoming as full a person
as you possibly can.
The world is made out of billions
of people going through that same
process.”
The Search for The Self
The Actor
David Threlfall (Peer Gynt)
believes that “the play deals in
trying to tune into yourself, to
what the real self is. It is easy to
make Peer this
swaggering braggart but then you
ask why is somebody like that?
What are they covering? Someone
may seem confident and successful
but what underlies that?”
David feels that the actor’s job is
to peel away the character’s layers
of armour, just as Peer Gynt
himself peels away the layers of an
onion. “He is a character who
finally realises that he has been an
egoist all his life - he just did not
acknowledge it. He has the
potential to be all sorts of things,
just as we all have, but we all bury
that potential in different ways. We
build up layers of armour as we
grow up. What we have to do as
actors is to undo that armour. My
job is to get that armour off.”
Ibsen
himself declared that he “derived
many features of Peer Gynt…
from self-dissection”. In order to
uncover Peer’s journey through
the play David has found that he
too must explore what lies within
himself.
He feels that “the character will
be a lot of my own imaginative
and creative juices - probably
more than anything I have done
here. I think there will be a lot of
me in it, in terms of the choices I
make in life. Having said that there
are a lot of choices in the play
which I would not make, but the
joy is to be able to imagine what it
would be like.”
The Actress
Josette Bushell-Mingo not only
plays Peer’s true love, Solveig, but
also three other
women whom Peer encounters
during the play - Ingrid the
captured bride, the mysterious
Greenclad One who produces
Peer’s baby, and Anitra the selfseeking
cult member.
The idea behind this doubling is to
demonstrate what director
Braham Murray believes is “a more
complex and interesting view of
women”. All four characters are
different facets of the same
women, it is just that Peer does
not understand this. At the end of
the play, Josette explains, “Peer
comes to recognise Solveig as a
person and he realises that he has
been running away from her. Peer
learns to accept all those women,
but all those women within
Solveig.”
Josette too
has found the
starting point
for all four
characters
within herself.
“I have
realised
though that
the four
characters
are within
me, more than any part. I start as
much as I can from myself. Solveig
has usually been played by white
actresses so, as a black actress, I
have to find my own images that I
can refer to and use as a
springboard.
“One of the things I am striving to
do is not make Solveig boring!
Solveig is not a wimp. When you
first meet her she is a bit naive,
but everything is there - it just
has not been tapped. She is funny,
she is strong, and she is special
but she does
not know it.”
Josette is
determined to
show that
Solveig “has not
sacrificed her
life for Peer.
She is on an
equal journey,
even though it
is an opposite
journey, it is to be the keeper of
his flame, but her flame is as
important. Her spiritual journey
and her self-awakening as a young
woman is important.”
Braham Murray and the cast in rehearsals three weeks before opening.