I. A narrow word that is constantly being persecuted, desired, loaded, constructed, determined. And always on the run. Who is I?

Peer Gynt, one of the best-known (dream) travellers in European literature, is an immortal ageing child, the stuff of legends. Henrik Ibsen sends him through times and worlds in order to find himself, his core. The escape that Peer makes from his village in Norway, fleeing from social insignificance to become somebody at last, ideally an Emperor, leads him to trolls and invalids, apes and slaves, through the desert and across the sea. He casts off one life after another like the skins of a snake and after every failure he rises up again somewhere new. He is a restless wanderer through the world, an (almost) immortal egomaniac, committed only to his unbreakable belief: it’s all about me, my entire life. His journey – a giant fairground, desperately hopping from one experience to the next, a collection of hybrid prototype selves and gestures of worn-out humanity revolving around a black hole: who is Peer?

Peer Gynt contains the – male-influenced – principle of a liberal market world, one that gropes into every corner, assesses everything for its additional value and uses it to its own advantage before discarding it. Yet at the same time Ibsen’s phantasmagoria shows us someone who is socially declassé, who conforms to the laws of his world and makes a detour around the other one with wasteful lies and disposable gestures in order to reach the realisation that “paradise is barred and the cherub is behind us; we must travel around the world and see if it might still be open somewhere from behind.” (Heinrich von Kleist)

In Peer Gynt, the Czech director Dušan David Pařízek, who recently directed Iphigenia by Euripides and Jelinek at Schauspielhaus Bochum, will compose a study of sociopathic male power structures on which a flawed system is based: the world in which we live.