Peer Gynt returns home from a reindeer hunt and tells his mother Åse a wild tale she recognizes as a stolen Norwegian folktale.

Peer places his furious mother Åse on the millhouse roof and rides alone to the wedding at Haegstad.

Peer meets a modest, devout girl named Solveig at the wedding and becomes immediately captivated by her.

Peer breaks into the hayloft and runs off with Ingrid the bride, throwing the wedding into chaos.

After knocking himself unconscious in the mountains, Peer follows a mysterious Woman in Green and poses as a prince to court her.

The troll king offers Peer his daughter and an underground kingdom in exchange for giving up sunlight and human ways.

The troll princess announces she is carrying Peer's child, and the enraged troll king orders Peer thrown off a cliff.

Escaping the trolls, Peer is stopped in pitch darkness by the Great Bøyg, a passive voice that tells him to go round.

Solveig leaves her family behind and travels through the snowy forest to live with Peer in his woodland hut.

The troll woman arrives at Peer's hut with their grotesque child and demands he evict Solveig; Peer chooses to flee the forest instead.

Peer visits his dying mother Åse and comforts her final moments with a vivid fantasy of traveling together to a heavenly banquet; she dies.

Peer's friends steal his yacht filled with gold and sail away; Peer watches the ship explode and thanks God for the punishment.

Peer is dragged to a Cairo madhouse by Begriffenfeldt and crowned emperor of self after two inmates kill themselves on his advice.

Peer's ship wrecks off the Norwegian coast, and he clings to the hull and refuses to make room for the drowning cook.

Old Peer collapses at Solveig's feet outside the forest hut; she forgives all his sins while the Button Molder waits at the crossroads.

Pool 1 traces the central arc of Peer Gynt's remarkable and reckless life, from his chaotic youth in a Norwegian village to his return home as an old man. As a young man, his impulsiveness drives him to kidnap a bride, venture into a troll kingdom, and abandon the woman he loves. He watches his mother die before departing on a decades-long quest for self and empire. In middle age, wealth and power slip through his fingers in Morocco and Egypt, and he is humiliated at every turn. As an old man, he survives a shipwreck only to face the judgment of his soul. The pool closes with his return to Solveig, whose patient love has preserved the best version of him all along.

The headline events of Peer Gynt's journey from reckless youth to final redemption.

Åse scolds Peer for fighting Aslak the blacksmith and mourns the Gynt family's wealth, lost long ago to his father's recklessness.

Hiding at the wedding, Peer daydreams of riding as a king through cheering crowds and tossing gold coins into the streets.

Peer entertains the wedding crowd with wild boasts, claiming he once trapped the Devil himself inside a nutshell.

Mads Moen, the would-be groom, desperately offers Peer an ox in exchange for luring Ingrid out of the locked hayloft.

In the hills above Haegstad, Peer coldly rejects Ingrid and compares her unfavorably to the pure and modest Solveig.

Åse and Solveig's family comb the hills searching for Peer; Solveig listens intently as Åse tells stories about her son.

Three herd girls shout for mountain trolls to come to their beds; Peer announces himself a troll and spends the night with them.

Peer wakes hungover and bewildered in the mountains, wanders through the wilderness, and slams into a rockface, knocking himself unconscious.

Banished to the forest, Peer watches a young boy use a sickle to cut off his own finger to avoid military conscription.

After the court strips Åse of her possessions to pay Peer's fines, she sorts through the ruins and finds his old tin casting ladle.

Peer instructs his Moroccan friends to sail to Greece and supply both sides of the Greco-Turkish War to maximize his profits.

Peer discovers two thieves have abandoned a stolen horse and sheikh's finery, mounts the horse, and declares himself a prince.

A now middle-aged Solveig still lives in the forest hut Peer built, praying faithfully that he will keep his promise to return.

Old Peer refuses to tip the ship's crew after learning that every sailor has a wife and children waiting at home.

Peer returns to his old village for an auction and asks strangers who Peer Gynt was; he is told Peer was a hopeless yarnspinner.

Pool 2 captures the moments and ripple effects surrounding Peer's grand misadventures. His boastful lies at the wedding, his cold rejection of Ingrid in the hills, and his night with the herd girls reveal a young man who cannot stop performing. His banishment forces him to witness the quieter life he refuses — embodied by the boy who chops his own finger off — while his mother bears the full cost of his recklessness. In Morocco, his manipulation of friends and his opportunistic disguise as a sheikh show a lifelong pattern of self-invention at others' expense. The pool ends with his ghostly return to a village that holds an auction for his name and where no one recognizes the man Peer Gynt once was.

The surrounding encounters and consequences that fill out Peer's world.

Peer vows to stop Ingrid's wedding and become a king; Åse reveals Ingrid was promised to another man while Peer was away hunting.

The troll king explains that while humans say 'to thyself be true,' trolls say 'be true to yourself-ish,' and Peer agrees to adopt the motto.

The troll king insists Peer undergo an eye operation to permanently alter his perception and make him see as a troll does; Peer refuses and tries to leave.

Church bells rung by Solveig's sister Helga send the troll children shrieking and fleeing, accidentally saving Peer from being thrown off the cliff.

Peer meets Solveig's frightened sister Helga in the forest and offers a silver button in exchange for passing a message to Solveig.

In Morocco, Peer tells his friends his guiding philosophy: never marry, always look out for himself, and one day become emperor of the world.

Anitra showers Peer with flattery in exchange for his jewels, then strikes him with his own whip, steals his horse, and gallops away.

Humiliated by Anitra's theft, Peer strips off his Bedouin clothes and resolves to abandon wealth and women and become a traveling history scholar.

At the Sphinx in Egypt, Peer tells Begriffenfeldt that the Sphinx is simply himself, and Begriffenfeldt immediately crowns him emperor of enlightenment.

Begriffenfeldt announces that Common Sense expired the previous night, locks the madhouse wardens in their own cages, and throws the key down a well.

A priest eulogizes a man who once chopped his finger off to avoid conscription, calling him a hero who bravely fought his own small war.

Peer peels an onion layer by layer hoping to find the core self inside, but discovers there is nothing at the center.

The Button Molder tells old Peer that his soul will be melted down in a casting ladle since he was neither sinner enough for hell nor saint enough for heaven.

The troll king tells old Peer that he has been living as a troll all along, having adopted 'be true to yourself-ish' long ago.

The Thin Person reveals he is the Devil collecting a soul named Peer Gynt; Peer misdirects him to the Cape of Good Hope.

Pool 3 follows the moments of decision and self-discovery that run through Peer's entire life. The troll king's lesson about selfhood plants a seed of moral compromise that shapes every subsequent choice Peer makes, from his pursuit of empire in Morocco to his crowning at the Cairo madhouse. His humiliation by Anitra and the impossibility of finding his true self in an Egyptian onion force him to confront the emptiness at the center of a life lived entirely for the self. A priest's eulogy for a quiet man who fought his own small war offers a counter-vision of what a meaningful life can look like. In the final reckoning, Peer discovers that the Devil has been searching for him all along, and that only Solveig's enduring love has preserved any real version of himself worth saving.

The pivotal choices, discoveries, and revelations that define who Peer Gynt really is.