'Liar, blaggard, louse, drunk, violent, then shockingly, pitifully tender, mad as a tree, good occasionally, to his mother, cracked about women, afraid of men, sorely needing his absent father, crazed with ambition, sick from failure, this creature I wouldn't let into my house, but I welcomed him charging into my head, for the pain, the terrible pain of Peer Gynt must be endured as well. It was endured through that formidable energy of Ibsen, obsessing me, rampaging forward, taking the classic five-act form and inflating it beyond repair, risking artistic suicide so that the theatre might never be the same again.' Frank McGuinness in his Introduction.

By a prodigious feat of imaginative empathy and literary skill, Frank McGuinness has remade Ibsen's epic verse picaresque into a work as valid in the twenty-first century as when it was first written in 1867.

Peer Gynt, in this version, was revived at the Royal National Theatre, London in October 2000.