The play The Feast of St. John by Henrik Ibsen unfolds during a summer celebration ‒ with pagan, pre-Christian roots ‒ on a farm in Telemark.

The different settings in which the events take place symbolize the varying perceptions: the farmhouse, the modern residence, the countryside with its animistic nature.

There, the protagonists gather, reinterpreting not only their relationships but also their lives, with the symbolic intervention of the nisse, a spirit that mixes the juice of a magical herb into the punch bowl on the eve of St. John’s feast.

The herb has the power to provide the one who takes it with the ability to see the true essence of things with their inner vision.

The work is clearly romantic and follows the core ideas of the era that seek the poet to be in communion with folk culture.