"Life is a terrible price to pay for birth." On a blind tasting you'd say that was a line out of Beckett. In fact, it comes from Michael Meyer's translation of Ibsen's sprawling epic; and it says much for Toby Frow's inventive, minimalist staging for a new company, State of Unrest, that you notice often-overlooked lines while grasping the work's Faustian structure.
Presented on a big scale, Ibsen's play can seem an interminable extravaganza. But Frow sensibly trims the text to two-and-a-half hours and, using eight actors, plays it on a small circular stage ringed by 40 spectators.
Our imaginations supply much of the visual detail supplemented by Jean Marc Puissant's ingenious, circumambient design. White-sheeted shadow-play conjures up Peer's mother stuck on top of a mill-house or the confrontation of God and St Peter. In the globe-travelling later stages you get elliptical hints of the Orient while an iron cage evokes the Cairo madhouse.
Even in a cut version you are aware of Ibsen's capaciousness. He finished the play in 1867, the year that saw the publication of the first volume of a similar assault on the unbridled entrepreneurial spirit, Das Kapital. If Ibsen coincides with Marx, he anticipates Freud in his exploration of Peer's troll-haunted subconscious.Theatrically, he also looks forward to Brecht in his picaresque structure and to Beckett in his mordant awareness of human isolation.
The most famous moment, when Peer peels an onion to reveal his emptiness, is here neatly done as Gordon Sterne's aged hero is bombarded by onions from all sides symbolising his multiple selves.
Three actors play Peer at different stages of his life: Stephen Hudson is the young Norwegian fantasist, Tim Hardy the cynical midlife capitalist and Sterne the aged shipwrecked traveller. Good as they are, I prefer a single Peer - but the great virtue of Frow's production is that it scales the play down without reducing it intellectually. It may be a baggy monster of a play but its overarching theme has never been more applicable. "Be thyself - and to Hell with the rest of the world," is Peer's philosophy. In Frow's production that line emerges with shocking clarity as if to underscore the fact that we live in an age plagued by self-worship.
· Until August 12. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
