It seemed as if Frank McGuinness's version of Henrik Ibsen's masterwork had disappeared without trace after its first production, under Patrick Mason's direction, in 1988, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Gate Theatre in Dublin. But here it is again, singing and leaping and dancing and bounding around under Conall Morrison's direction in the vastness of the Olivier Theatre's great round stage in London.
Francis O'Connor has provided it with a towering setting made of crates and all the trunks and suitcases left over from the current production of Hamlet (seen at the Dublin Theatre Festival) and then some more, to make craggy mountainous skylines, fronts of small houses, barren deserts, threatening oceans and more, all adorned with costumes by Joan O'Clery to dazzle the imagination and hugely atmospheric lighting by Paule Constable, which sometimes fails to illuminate the faces of the actors.
Here is an epic staging of an epic play, mirroring all the pain and the pleasure and the uncertainties of its eponymous hero, the action underscored (and occasionally overcome) by Conor Linehan's haunting music for keyboard, fiddle, pipes, plucked strings and percussion played live under Steven Edis's direction.
The young Gynt is played with super-charged energy by Chiwetel Ejiofor, braggart, liar, lothario, drunk, chased around the houses by his put-upon, God-help-us, God-save-us mother Ase - Sorcha Cusack, sporting (like most of the women in the Norwegian village) an Ulster accent. Patrick O'Kane's middle-aged successful businessman Gynt is still the same braggart and liar, but less easy with it, seeking sex from one of the slaves he comes to own when mistaken for a prophet in the East. The old Gynt, approaching death, is given a nice quietude underpinned by panic, by Joseph Marcell.
Olwen Fouere, the only remaining point of continuity with the original Gate Theatre production, is Peer's faithful and luminous Solveig in whose long-empty loving arms Gynt may find some redemption.
It is an uneven evening, just as are Ibsen's original and McGuinness's version. But it provides a tapestry of theatre that would bear re-visiting to unearth its dramatic riches.
In repertory at the National. To book: (0044 207 452 3000) or website www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
