For a long time Ibsen's Peer Gynt, subtitled “A Dramatic Poem,” was regarded as a play solely for the reader, a closet drama; it took nine years for it to reach the stage. Today it is frequently produced, often by big companies and renowned directors; with its multitude of characters and locations, productions of it tend to be costly.

B showed his interest in the play by producing it twice. The first production took place at Malmö City Theatre in 1957. The translation was by Karl-Ragnar Gierow. 90 actors appeared in 33 scenes. Rather than Grieg's or even Saverud's music, both specially composed for the play, B made sparse use of Norwegian folk music. Max von Sydow in the title role was “a dark-haired lad with gypsy blood in his veins.” Despite some cuts the performance lasted almost five hours (Steene, 2005: 581f.).

In his second production, in 1991, about one third of the drama text was omitted and the running time was reduced to nearly half of that in Malmö. In the booklet accompanying the theatre program the substantial deletions, this time in Lars Forssell's translation, were indicated. Among these are the two passages dealing with the young man cutting off his own finger to avoid conscription and the speech by the pastor at his funeral much later. Like most of the other characters surrounding Peer, the function of this army wash-out is to throw ideological and psychological light on Peer, who is his parallel and contrast (Fjelde in Ibsen, 1964: xviiif.). The Memnon statue, “a monument of Peer's own petrified self,” and the Lean Man, an incarnation of the Devil, who suddenly appears as Peer's co-passenger are other examples of substantial deletions. About all three characters can be said that because Ibsen provides so many examples of elements mirroring Peer's mentality or fate, it is quite easy to leave out some of them without disturbing the loose structure of the play, whose unity largely relies on the all-dominating protagonist and the leitmotif “be thyself.”

As the subtitle of the play indicates, Ibsen's text is in verse. Moreover, it is in rhymed verse. Although Ibsen's Dano-Norwegian is linguistically close to Swedish, the rhyming offers many difficulties. In his translation, Forssell therefore settled for a compromise.