GO AROUND

"Go Around" reimagines Henrik Ibsen's "Peer Gynt" for our contemporary moment. What initially drew me as a director was the play's lyrical form—how Ibsen deployed vivid Norwegian imagery and folklore to excavate the inner life of his protagonist. In Peer, I recognized the everyman at modernity's threshold.

Ibsen's prescience is striking: he anticipated a future where absolute truth dissolves and personal narratives construct reality. This insight shaped my adaptation's core.

Here, Peer becomes a young woman in her twenties, tethered to a mentally ill mother who has taught her—perhaps without meaning to—to navigate the porous boundary between storytelling and deception. She dreams of escape, of the moment when her words might finally construct her own reality and "realize" her true self.

Yet in life's twilight, she discovers a cruel irony. Her relentless pursuit of self-realization has yielded only an image, a projection. In chasing this phantom, she may have lost her authentic self—if such a thing ever existed.

"Go Around" interrogates identity in an age of curated narratives. What do we sacrifice at the altar of self-actualization? In constructing ourselves, what slips away?