This paper addresses how contemporary theatre practitioners use Henrik Ibsen’s plays to approach the topic of otherness through different strategies of expressing temporality on stage. The object of the investigation is the Peer Gynt production of the Markus&Markus Theatre Collective (Germany), which participated at the Ibsenfestival in Oslo in 2016.
The production addresses the issue of the marginal position in society of people suffering from mental illnesses and uses Ibsen’s Peer Gynt as a starting point. The notion of “shared time” emerges as a central topic in the encounters with Herbert, a man suffering from dementia. Thus, temporality becomes the theatre company’s tool to deal with otherness and disability in relationship with their protagonist.
Drawing on this man’s sense of lived time, the members of the theatre company delve into his experience, which they bring on stage to challenge the audience’s perception and understanding of temporality. The research considers a phenomenological approach as its starting point, and it further employs the concept of “coevalness” (Johannes Fabian) as scholarly concept for Markus&Markus’s notion of “shared time”. The concept is useful to investigate which theoretical reflections on the relationship between otherness and temporality we can extract by looking at how Ibsen is used to represent time on stage. Eventually, the production reveals how the members of the company developed four strategies to bring Herbert’s perspective to the centre of the production. As time is stoppable, discontinuous, simultaneous, and reversible in Markus&Markus’s approach of Ibsen, Herbert-Peer moves from being an individual with a marginal position in society to being the protagonist of a story about learning to share a unique struggle.
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Gianina Druță is an Associate Professor of drama at the Faculty of Education and International Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University. She holds a PhD from the University of Oslo, which she obtained with a thesis entitled Ibsen at the Theatrical Crossroads of Europe: A Performance History of Henrik Ibsen’s Plays on the Romanian Stages (1894–1947). Since January 2025, she has been a part time Associate Professor at the Centre for Ibsen Studies at UiO.