Performing Arts Capstone Showcase: Peer Gynt

Peer Gynt

2 Parts. 2 Visions. 1 Epic Fairytale.

A Collarts Performing Arts Graduating Production – Company T3 2025

Directed by Briony Dunn and Kitan Petkovski. 

Presented by Collarts Faculty of Performing Arts at The Malthouse Theatre.

About the Show:

How far can a lie take you before you lose yourself within it?

A liar, a lover, a dreamer on the run – Peer Gynt journeys through worlds both imagined and remembered, chasing glory, dodging consequence, and bargaining with his own soul.

Performed in two parts by two graduating ensembles, this bold reimagining of Ibsen’s epic invites you into a landscape of wild imagination and aching humanity – a place where fantasy and truth blur, and redemption flickers just out of reach.

Two worlds. Two visions. One liar’s impossible search for themselves.

Directors' Notes

PART 1 - Kitan Petkovski

Bringing Peer Gynt Part 1 to life has been an invigorating creative journey. In our adaptation, the story unfolds amid the stark grandeur of the Australian outback — a remote, isolated community framed by endless horizons of red earth and open sky. This landscape becomes a mirror of Peer’s imagination: vast, unforgiving, and charged with mythic potential. Within it, trolls, witches, and the enigmatic Boyg arise organically from the extremities of heat, solitude, and the primal struggle for survival.

Our interpretation of Part 1 is driven by the untamed energy of Peer’s youth — his feverish dreaming, his impulsive pursuit of identity and meaning. Through an intensely physical and ensemble-driven approach, we explore how Peer’s internal landscapes bleed into the world around him, blurring the thresholds between the real and the surreal.

Collaboration has been the foundation of this process. Working closely with our assistant directors, designers, and performers, we have sought to reimagine Ibsen’s classic as an Australian myth — one that captures both the boundless imagination and the rugged spirit of this land.

Directors' Notes

PART 2 - Briony Dunn

From the ungoverned exuberance of his youth, in Part 2 Peer has grown older but no wiser. Twenty years after the events of Part 1, Peer has launched himself into a globe-spanning odyssey, running not toward purpose but away from societal rejection and the loss of loved ones, away from responsibility, away from reality, and away from the unfulfilled life he refuses to face. Inspired by a real Norwegian folk figure remembered as untrustworthy yet charismatic, Peer is restless, evasive, and fundamentally incapable of stillness or truth. He thrives on spectacle, opportunism, and serial self-invention. He is a figure of wild contradictions: charming one moment and hateful the next; magnetic and playful before turning violent, morally adrift, and capable of profound harm.

The troll creed “To thine own self be enough” is a brand burnt onto Peer’s soul. It signifies pure selfishness: a worldview in which one’s desires justify any action and the humanity of others barely registers. Peer’s globe-trotting life of indulgence and self-aggrandisement reveals a man moving through the world with a steadily decaying moral centre. As nineteenth-century Norway attempted to obscure its involvement in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Ibsen shaped Peer as a critique of nationalism, capitalism, and the seductive rot of personal mythmaking: an opportunist who exploits anyone and anything to protect his own legend. Peer speaks with uncomfortable clarity to our current moment, recalling the billionaire-manchild whose charm, wealth, and endless reinvention mask decadence, moral bankruptcy, and an abiding emptiness.

Across his 25-year journey, Peer careens from continent to continent in a destructive search for meaning that unravels him and leaves devastation in his wake. He believes himself exceptional, yet he is as ordinary as ever. He commits acts of deep corruption without recognising them as wrong and everyone in the world of Peer Gynt – even the fallen Troll King – sees these transgressions for what they are except Peer himself. Racing away from accountability while hurtling toward it with every misguided step, Peer is drawn compulsively toward the very reckoning he fears. This refusal to examine his own impact becomes the true corruption at the heart of the play. In following Peer’s flight from truth and his inevitable collision with himself, we aim to reveal not only a mythic figure of the nineteenth century but a painfully recognisable figure of our own times.

ABOUT THE CAPSTONE PROJECT

The Capstone Project is the final major undertaking for our graduating students. This project brings together students from the Bachelor of Performing Arts programs in Acting, Writing & Directing, and Stage Management to create a fully realised public production under the guidance of industry professionals.

Students apply the skills and knowledge they have developed across their degree — from interpreting text and shaping performance to leading creative processes and managing the technical and organisational aspects of production. Each student steps into a role aligned with their training and professional interests, contributing to a production environment that mirrors industry practice.

The Capstone is both a culmination and a launch pad — a transition from training to the profession.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY

Collarts acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we learn, work and create. We pay our respects to Elders past and present. Sovereignty has never been ceded.

Artist: Nakia Cadd 

INDUSTRY CONTACT

Nicholas Coghlan (Program Coordinator – Acting) 
ncoghlan@collarts.edu.au