Peer Gynt

O’Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College ***

PEER GYNT– an epic, episodic, sprawling verse drama from 1876 – is one of the most widely staged Norweigan plays in theatre. This would surprise nobody more than Henrik Ibsen, its writer, who designed it to be unstageable.

Careening through a blur of locations, balanced precariously between fantasy and satire, the density of its verse made it a “closet play” – a play that preferred to be read; less a show to be staged, than a problem to be solved. This is where Arthur Riordan steps in.

Riordan isn't the first Irish writer to adapt Ibsen's play: there are several Gynts among his peers. But, from the espionage and crosswords of his Improbable Frequencyto the metafictive puzzles of Slattery's Sago Saga, Riordan has always been an imaginative code-breaker. His staggeringly thorough rendering of the text – and its metre – creates a winningly effervescent Hiberno-Norwegian idiom. Just listen to Aase (the wonderful Karen Ardiff), berate Rory Nolan's cocksure Peer like a typical Norwegian mammy: "Oh, you're the mighty man, mar dheadh,/ All talk you are, just like your da."

Actually, Peer, like Ibsen and Riordan, is more adapter than storyteller: he takes the tales of others and makes them his own. (At least Riordan acknowledges his sources, in one cheering conceit of Rough Magic’s quick-witted production, right from the stage.) Such attention to detail is both the great literary achievement and the theatrical stumbling block of director Lynne Parker’s ambitious production. Fine-chiselling each line, setting the play in a stunningly intact 19th-century sanatorium (designed and lit by John Comiskey and Alan Farquarson), scoring it with live eastern-tinged folk of music group Tarab and marshalling a divine cast (including Hilary O’Shaughnessy, Sarah Greene, Peter Daly, Fergal McElherron and Will O’Connell) to its service, the production is cluttered with talent, unable to see the wood for the trees.

The problem is that the text, heavy with rhyming couplets and often breathlessly propelled by the beat of a bodhrán, just won’t sing (generally, in fact, it’s rapped). When the music stops for the cynical counsel of Riordan’s Mountain King (“‘Be yourself,’ is what humans say . . . The troll says, ‘be yourself – sure’.”), both the play’s cultural satire and its philosophical treatise becomes stimulatingly clear: the squandered moment of prosperity has sounded the hollow in society and set everyone spinning; our true identities exist somewhere between the reach of idealism and the grasp of what’s possible.

Like Peer’s meditation on an onion, you have to peel away several layers before you reach that understanding, but there are worse things than ambition. In its own wonderful, frustrating way, Rough Magic is just being itself.

Runs until October 16th