Peer Gynt
Play Description
The title character, based on a legendary Norwegian folk hero, is a rogue who is saved by the love of a woman. Peer Gynt is a charming but arrogant peasant youth who leaves his widowed mother in order to seek his fortune. Confident of success, he has one disastrous adventure after another. In one, he attends the wedding of the wealthy young woman he himself might have married. There he meets Solveig, who falls in love with him. He impulsively abducts the bride from her wedding celebration and subsequently abandons her. Peer Gynt embarks on a series of fantastic voyages around the world, finding wealth and fame but never happiness. Finally, as an old, disillusioned man, he returns to Norway, where Solveig, ever faithful, welcomes him lovingly, and he is redeemed.
Production Info
Cast: 28 total (10 female, 18 male)Full Length Drama (about 160 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Author(s)
Henrik IbsenHenrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906) was a Norwegian dramatist and is considered the father of the modem drama. He first won worldwide attention with A DOLL'S HOUSE (1879). His next play, GHOSTS, dealt openly with the topic of venereal disease and aroused great opposition. He replied to his critics by writing AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE (1881), where he showed that an individual may be right while society is wrong. His other plays include PEER GYNT (1867), THE WILD DUCK (1884), ROSMERSHOLM (1886), THE LADY FROM THE SEA (1888), HEDDA GABLER (1890), THE MASTER BUILDER (1892), LITTLE EYOLF (1894), JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN (1896), and WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN (1899).
Kenneth McLeishKenneth McLeish (1940 – 1997) studied Classics and Music at Worcester College, Oxford. After starting as a schoolteacher, he became a full-time translator, author, and dramatist, and in time the most widely respected and prolific translator of drama in Britain. His output included all 47 of the surviving classical Greek plays, most of Ibsen and Feydeau, as well as individual plays by Plautus, Molière, Jarry, Strindberg, Horvath, and Labiche. His original plays and translations have been widely performed, most notably by England's National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Book Information
| Publisher | Nick Hern Books |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 9/1/1999 |
| Pages | 128 |
| ISBN | 9781854594358 |
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com
Upcoming and Recent Productions
Nonprofessional
Related Plays
$19.95–$20.00
Collection Description
This collection includes five long one-act plays: THE AWFUL TOOTH, BLASTED EVENT, DEAD WRONG, POTTY FAVORS, and SHE CAN’T BARE IT! Master Belle Époque farceur Georges Feydeau loosely based these brilliantly funny long one-acts on the failure of his own marriage. The plays, greatly admired in his time, were described by a prominent critic as “insane merriment, inextinguishable laughter.” With DEAD WRONG, the first play in the collection, Feydeau launched a new genre: the marital farce, the hell of couples. And “like the very great comic writers,” another critic noted, Feydeau “knows how to make the public laugh at his personal bitterness.” It was Feydeau himself who suggested that these five one-acts be collected under the title FROM MARRIAGE TO DIVORCE. This collection, which for the first time brings these plays together in English, honors that suggestion. Distinguished translator Laurence Senelick has taken care to preserve all of Feydeau’s stage directions as sure guides to staging the plays for maximum effect. DEAD WRONG: A husband and wife stay together by force of habit, their relationship based on nothing solid. The wife’s aggression and bitterness and the husband’s selfishness and irresponsibility are revealed, and their ferocious animosity unleashes such powerful comedy that it obscures the underlying darkness. POTTY FAVORS: Inspired by Feydeau’s wife’s obsession with giving the children laxatives, especially his eldest son, Jacques, every character is despicable for their moral cowardice and egoism, providing a hopeless (but hilarious) environment for child-rearing. SHE CAN’T BARE IT!: What to do about a wife going around the apartment in her nightie until lunchtime? BLASTED EVENT: Trapped in a misalliance, a husband is set upon by his wife, his in-laws, and the midwife. THE AWFUL TOOTH was the last new play of Feydeau to be produced in his lifetime, and its dentist’s chair offers a dose of sadistic hilarity. As translator Laurence Senelick notes, “Feydeau may be to dentists what Molière was to doctors.”
Plays in This Collection
Full Length Drama (about 160 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
A selfish, cynical woman bored by her marriage to the scholar Jorgen Tesman, Hedda Gabler's father's pair of pistols provide intermittent diversion, as do the attentions of the ne'er-do-well Judge Brack. When Thea Elvestad, a longtime acquaintance of Hedda's, reveals that she has left her husband for the writer Ejlert Lovborg, who once pursued Hedda, the latter becomes vengeful. Learning that Ejlert has forsworn liquor, Hedda first steers him to a rowdy gathering at Brack's and subsequently burns the reputedly brilliant manuscript that he loses there while drunk. Witnessing his desperation, she sends him one of the pistols, and he shoots himself. Brack deduces Hedda's complicity and demands that she become his mistress in exchange for his silence about the matter. Instead, she ends her ennui with the remaining pistol. The work is remarkable for its nonjudgmental depiction of an immoral, destructive character, one of the most vividly realized women in dramatic literature.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 160 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$0.00–$15.95
Play Description
Based on the classic novella, this original adaptation takes you to the dismal streets of London in the 1860s, where societal pressures silence a gentle doctor's questions about the nature of morality. As the pressure intensifies, Dr Jekyll takes matters into his own hands. However, things take an eerie turn when his experiment takes on a life of its own. Will his efforts save the world, or will they destroy all that he holds dear? After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Production Info
Cast: 16 total (7 female, 9 male, flexible casting, bit parts)Full Length Comedy (about 80 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
Richard Nelson’s critically lauded adaptation of Strindberg’s classic, in which a power struggle between husband and wife leads to devastating consequences.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 95 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Welcome to Karlovec, a small town that the Soviets had started to build a nuclear plant in, but it was never completed. Now in the post-Soviet era Western firms are desperate to take over and build the plant. They turn their attention to the town’s mayor who finds himself courted on all sides
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00
Play Description
Set in Denmark in the early 1890s, Nina, the Snow Queen, has migrated south yet once again to find her “boy” for the season. Upon running into Christian, she chooses him and whisks him away up north for the winter. But relationships are never that easy, and even though Nina has all the glitz and glamour on her side, as the winter draws to an end and spring appears, Analiese, the young heroine, journeys north to find her love. Thus a timeless tale wrought with danger, adventure, and love, THE SNOW QUEEN is a fairytale for adults who still believe in magic. Based on the classic Hans Christian Anderson story.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 60 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
A fresh, performable version of Goethe's “unstageable” masterpiece. God and Mephistopheles vie for the mortal soul of Dr Faust. Signing a pact with the nihilistic spirit, Faust is privy to knowledge unbound and sensual delights of which most men can only dream. But before long, the Doctor comes to realise that you should always be very careful what you wish for.
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (5 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 240 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
A comical, anachronistic, and witty retelling of the Greek myth, composed “after Kleist by way of Molière with a little bit of Giraudoux.”
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (2 female, 5 male)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95
Play Description
In Strindberg’s classic, Miss Julie, the daughter of a powerful count, enters into a dangerously flirtatious relationship with a footman on her father’s estate. The critics have described Richard Nelson’s adaptation as “tight, sharp, idiomatic.”
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
On the docks of late 18th-century Rhode Island, two runaway slaves, Adjua and Dembi, plan a desperate and daring run to freedom. When a chance encounter triggers an unexpected collision of worlds, painful truths are uncovered, and the brutality of past crimes spills into the next generation.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (3 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Len Jenkin's surrealistic comedy uses Franz Kafka's story “Ein Landarzt” as a point of departure to explore his personal life and literary works.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Comedy (about 75 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
Originally published in 1892 and first performed in 1893, THE MASTER BUILDER explores the needs of the artist in relation to those of society and the limits of artistic creativity. There is an autobiographical element in the depiction of the aging architect, Halvard Solness, who feels pressure from a younger, more idealistic and ambitious generation of architects and fears the decay of his own creativity.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes