Henrik Ibsen's poetic drama Peer Gynt (1867) stands at a crossroads in Ibsen's dramatic career. It marks both the end and the apex of his great achievements as a poetic dramatist. At the same time, Peer Gynt signifies a new direction in Ibsen's work toward psychological and philosophical stories about individuals confronting life in the modern world. Ibsen's first break into philosophical drama came with his earlier poetic comedy Love's Comedy. Ibsenborrowed the theme of this play from the great Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Unfortunately, Love's Comedy was not a commercial success. It was Brand, the story of a priest whose motto "all or nothing" leads to his own destruction, that marked Ibsen's first great success, and many of Ibsen's contemporaries saw in this play an obvious Kierkegaardian influence. Ibsenfollowed Brand with his monumental companion piece, Peer Gynt, a play that now ranks with Goethe's Faust and Shakespeare's Hamlet as one of the great philosophical dramas of all time. More than any of Ibsen's other plays Peer Gynt IS an expression of Kierkegaard. The great theme of Ibsen's play IS its depiction of a common man who desires nothing more than to achieve his true self and live his life freely and fully. Mirroring Kierkegaard's remarkably modern psychological insights, Ibsen's Peer Gynt is also a universal story of tragic doubt or despair over choice, which Kierkegaard labels 'the sickness unto death', and which determines the whole course of Peer's life, casting him into the darkness of anti-heroism. The crux of what makes Ibsenand his plays-most notably Peer Gynt-relevant to the 21st century derives from the mid 191 h century Kierkegaadian notion of modern freedom, the freedom to choose oneself. Religious fundamentalism is the contemporary antagonist of Ibsen. Fundamentalism traps existence in an endless mindless tunnel. It is not concerned with the individual or the Gyntian attainment of one's self. Fundamentalism and the religions that have spawned it are responsible for disemboweling choice; they are the single dead-end out of the modern world. Thus, now more than ever we need the plays of Ibsenin order to speak out against the global catastrophe of fundamentalism.