Theatre review: 'The Big I Am' @ Liverpool Everyman 20/06/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 27th Jun 18

The Liverpool Everyman Company’s new Ibsen adaptation, ‘The Big I Am’, is fantastic. At times anarchic and juvenile, sometimes harmonious and poignant, it transfers Ibsen’s Peer Gynt into 20^th-century Liverpool, tracking the eponymous Gynt through the 60s, 80s and noughties and corssing continents in the process. Its mix of heightened realism and absurdism is highly energetic, and throughout cast demonstrate imagination in absurdist choices. Sometimes the juvenility is too much – only sometimes though, and certainly not enough to take away from what a fantastic experience this show is.

The play features a great cast, all 3 ages of Gynt – young, middle-aged and old, each played by a different actor – are equally good. The ensemble is great, and the attention given to peripheral characters (in Gynt’s world, all characters seem peripheral, even when he’s offstage) is sufficient to amuse without being distracting from the scene. There’s plenty of music throughout, sometimes in the scene and sometimes as backing, from a variety of eras and genres, and there’s also singing in perhaps unusual or unexpected places which is very enjoyable. The production is a good track of the passage of slow time but the first act is too long. It did keep my attention throughout, but the play in total runs to 3 hours so be warned. It requires endurance, but it pays off in a big little way.

The writer refers to his own project as ambitious, and despite some elements earlier on that ambition pays off, especially as the end of the play ties together the themes, of individualism, absurdism, existentialism. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson had the original as a ‘satire on Norwegian egotism, narrowness, and self-sufficiency’, but that attitude also manifests in a certain brand of Northern working-class masculinity, so too in the play in such phenomena as the hollow venture capitalism unleashed by Raegan-Thatcherism in the 80s and coke-snorting Vegas televangelists in the 90s (this play goes places). Gynt’s wild pursuits of hedonism and individualism are visualised fantastically in the absurd staging, and came together at the end for a fantastically crushing and lonely ending which is unafraid of dabbling in the philosophical language of existentialism in a way which jars fantastically with the earlier dialogue.

Language is important here, and the way the play talks to the audience. The assistant’s note references poetry grounded very much in the everyday, and this is something very striking about the play. Adapted from Danish-language verse drama, it’s cast in a solid everyday realism which Gynt and others’ idealism constantly struggles against, creating a great, yearning tension. It’s played in the round so the raucous over-the-top acting is called for and that demand is met aptly, and the audience were loving it. The play is certainly commendable for involving audience interaction which makes you happy to be there rather than making your skin crawl. All in all – I highly recommend. You have till the 21^stof July – get yourself to Liverpool.

[5 stars]