“Jeppe on the Hill”, Directed By Christian Lollike at Aarhus Theatre

‘People say that Jeppe drinks, but no one asks why Jeppe drinks’. This saying in the Danish vernacular, coming from the 18^th century Dano-Norwegian comedy classic by Ludvig Holberg Jeppe on the Hill, has been a starting point for Christian Lollike’s award-winning adaptation, co-written with dramaturg Anders Thrue Djurslev. Originally mounted at Aarhus Theatre in 2025, and recently revived as a sell-out success, Lollike’s adaptation re-reads Holberg’s carnivalesque cautionary tale about the dangers of empowering the masses as an apocalyptic satire about the very role of art in contemporary society.

Holberg’s happy-go-lucky simpleton and henpecked husband, Jeppe, is played with understated charisma by TV star Thure Lindhardt – and in Lollike’s production he is a soldier with PTSD, married to a sex worker! In both versions the title character is a hopeless alcoholic, but the bar frequented by the latter is an exact replica of a swish drinking establishment standing opposite the Aarhus Theatre (this apparent coincidence has a very specific dramaturgical purpose which will be revealed just before the interval).

The original play’s inciting incident occurs when a local Baron and his entourage chance upon drunken Jeppe asleep on the road and they get the idea to prank the unfortunate peasant by having him wake up dressed as the Baron in his lodgings. Holberg’s pranksters indeed wonder for a moment what it would be like to put Jeppe on the theatre stage, but Lollike and Djurslev take this a step further, in multiple ways.

For a start, Jeppe wakes up as a subject of an art project authored by Baron and his collective, quite explicitly exploring questions of identity and privilege. What would have been relatively minor transgressions in an 18^th century comedy (fondling of a woman’s breast, for example) are here taken to even more shocking limits of tolerable social interaction by today’s standards. And even the gory hacking of limbs is not off the table in this version either.

Mirroring the original, the 21^st century Jeppe is immersed in two hypothetical scenarios: a baroque romp, complete with naked dancing, an actual knife eater (Cecilia Gosilla) and outrageous flirting with the audience, as well as a subsequent trial of Jeppe for his misdemeanors, staged here somewhat puzzlingly in the genre of a cowboy Western.

While Holberg gives his hero a happy ending through order restoration, a respite from domestic violence and a wad of money for his troubles to freely spend at the tavern, Lollike appends a provocative contemplation in the form of a royal award ceremony and an acceptance speech from Baron himself on the respective moral responsibilities of art, artist and society. Though art at times aspires towards transformative potential, Jeppe is clearly left in the ditch of alcoholism by both versions of the play.

Lollike’s production at Aarhus Theatre is already a sell out box office hit so it needs no further recommendation, especially not in this international context. However, there is much more left to say about it in terms of its authorial interrelations to Lollike’s own and other Danish works and artists.

One clear reference that this work – perhaps subtly and jokingly, but certainly unmistakably – evokes for me is the work of another Danish director of the same generation, Tue Biering. Since the early 2000s, with his company Fix&Foxy, Biering has famously made work with actual sex workers and war veterans suffering from PTSD, and in 2021 he made Dark Noon in the genre of a Western too in order to tell the story of colonization of America. (Even his lesser known 2023 work De Skamlösa, made at Malmö City Theatre is cited here by taking an apparently live camera outside of the theatre.) Biering is the type of director whose work has, like Baron’s, certainly explored the intersection of art and social issues, though perhaps not as cynically as Baron is shown to be doing in this case. He has incidentally also directed award-winning productions of Lollike’s early plays at Aarhus Theatre itself, so this could be assumed to be a friendly dig rather than a sharp critique of a colleague’s work.

But then there are also multiple levels of self-reflexivity in Lollike’s own creation. Having started his career as a playwright – at Aarhus Theatre where he is still clearly something of a house author – in the last ten years Lollike has increasingly turned to directing, mostly in Norway. Back in 2023, Lollike directed a version of Holberg’s Jeppe on the Hill at the Oslo National Theatre in which the Baron and his entourage represent reality TV producers whose work profits commercially rather than just artistically from personal suffering. More recently, in Germany, I saw his debut as director with Very Rich Angels in 2024 at Munich Kammerspiele, in collaboration with the Danish performance artist and author Madame Nielsen as author of the script. This piece, in which head puppet versions of Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg try to imagine a better future, is also in some way a riff on the same themes of privilege and identity (and subsequently he took this work forward into an installation co-authored with Madame Nielson and Anders Thrue Djurslev too). While in the Aarhus version of Jeppe, the Baron complains that it is much harder for an artist to occupy the position of privilege these days than the position of a marginalized identity, this is precisely however what Lollike and the Danish master of identity re-invention, Madame Nielsen, aim for in the Munich production. And the outcome is – a whimsical escape to the outer space. With or without Vladimir Putin, I cannot quite remember… Which is something I will not be saying about this version of Jeppe, much of which will linger as pretty unforgettable.