Peer Gynt and Suzannah: Revealing Representations of Age

Abstract

What does it mean to grow old? Are we destined to reach a peak of physical, mental, and social well-being at some relatively early age only to decline, either slowly or precipitously, toward death? Or are there surprising gifts to be had from aging, based on our inherent creativity, as it manifests in a myriad of ways throughout the latter half of life? From ancient Greek and Roman philosophy to contemporary conventional wisdom the former is favored, whereas age theorists in our contemporary time explore the latter. In the anglophonic world these concepts from age theory have been used, over the past twenty years, to examine plays and their performances. However, with the exception of Elinor Fuchs’s article, “Estragement: Towards an ‘Age Theory’ Theatre Criticism,” age theory has been largely ignored in scholarship about Norwegian drama (Fuchs 2014, 69). I aim to address this gap by exploring how age is represented in two Norwegian plays, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867) and Jon Fosse’s Suzannah (2004), thereby arriving at an understanding of what Fuchs calls “the immensity of the conscious experience of age” (Fuchs 2014, 77). I understand this phrase to point to something about the accumulation of experience, understanding, and perhaps even wisdom among those who have lived a long life. My intent is to explore how Peer Gynt and Suzannah bring to our awareness something beyond, as Fuchs writes, “the discourse of normative life, where the failing body-as-decline numbly presides” (Fuchs 2014, 77). This potential for reading dramatic literature with particular attention to aging is highly available in these two plays which enact three ages of the eponymous characters.