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by Will Eno, directed by Tim Carroll

Shaw Festival, Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

July 5-October 4, 2025

Mother: “When you begin sentences with ‘I’, I’m not even sure you know who you’re talking about”

In 2017 the Shaw Festival’s presented Middletown (2010), American playwright Will Eno’s modern take on Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town (1938). Now the Festival is presenting Gnit, Eno’s 2013 take on Henrik Ibsen’s classic Peer Gynt (1876). Anyone hoping for the enlightening experience Middletown provided will be disappointed. Eno himself labels Gnit “a fairly rough translation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt”, and that’s exactly its effect. It’s Peer Gynt without the poetry and riddled with jokey self-consciousness instead of wit. The production’s saving grace is how well it is performed by the actors.

For those unfamiliar with it, Peer Gynt is an epic play about a Norwegian folk hero, an anti-hero really, who presents the paradox of being an egocentric man in search of his self. The play follows Gynt, an inveterate liar, from youth to old age and watches him give in to every selfish lust and desire all the while claiming that he is on a journey of self-discovery. Fear of commitment to anything other than himself leads him to ruin the lives of everyone he meets. He kidnaps a bride from her wedding and then abandons her. He finds Solveig, a woman whom he knows is his true love, and abandons her. He builds a house for himself and Solveig and abandons it. He gives in to the charms of troll princess, gets her pregnant and abandons her. He becomes very wealthy by plying despicable businesses such as slave-trading but gives them up in hopes of becoming an emperor. Ironically, he does become an emperor when he is taken to a madhouse and is hailed as an emperor of self. Eventually, he returns to his home in Norway, where, like Goethe’s Faust (1832), he is both threatened with damnation and offered redemption.

There are two key reasons why Gnit ( the “G” is pronounced) is such a different kind of play from Middletown. The first is that regular North American theatre-goers are more than likely to be familiar with Our Townwhereas they are very unlikely to be familiar with Peer Gynt. I know of only four productions of Peer Gynt in Ontario in the last 100 years – one in the 1930s and another in the 1970s, both at the Hart House Theatre in Toronto, one in 1957 toured by the Canadian Players and the only Shaw Festival production of it in 1989.

The second reason is that in Middletown, Eno merely took the overall conception of Our Town, i.e., a portrait of a small town America, as his guide. In Gnit, Eno hews very closely to Ibsen’s plot and characters to the point that to understand fully how Eno is both celebrating and satirizing Ibsen, audience members would have to know Ibsen’s play. Since this situation is unlikely, Gnit presents us with the annoying spectacle of a playwright trying to draw humour from his own play’s differences from a play most of the audience will not know.

In Gnit, Eno has characters whom he calls the “Green Family” and “Woman in Green”. They wear fantastical costumes but all Eno tells us is that they work in real estate. Only if you know Ibsen’s play will you realize that these characters are the folkloric beings known as trolls and that the entire scene with the trolls may be only dreamt rather than real. Near the end an onion drops into Gnit’s hand. He is about to speak when a character representing the “Town” chides Gnit for being about to soliloquize about the onion instead of seeing his old sweetheart Solvay. Only if you know Ibsen’s play would you realize that Peer Gynt’s contemplation of an onion is one of the most important speeches of the play, one comically parallel to Hamlet’s contemplation of Yorick’s skull.

Peer Gynt sees the layers of the onion as representing the various stages of his life: “What an enormous number of swathings! / Is not the kernel soon coming to light? / I’m blest if it is! To the innermost centre, / It’s nothing but swathings—each smaller and smaller” (trans. William Archer, 1892). Gynt unwillingly realizes that at the centre of his life, where he thought his self should be, is nothingness. Eno clearly doesn’t want Gnit to come to any realization. Only if you know Ibsen’s play, will you know that Eno has changed the ending, eliminating Solveig, whom he calls Solvay, and the character of the Button-Maker, so that Gnit, unlike Gynt, is not faced with either redemption or damnation at the end. In his programme note, Eno says he was drawn to Peer Gynt because he disliked the ambiguity of Ibsen’s ending. Yet, by elimination any allusions to an afterlife, Eno ends the play unsatisfactorily simply with no comment at all.

The prime factor that makes Gnit watchable is a slew of fine performances from the cast. Only six actors play 35 roles. Only the actor playing Peter Gnit has no other roles. Qasim Khan has played a combination of innocent and braggart brilliantly as Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World for the Shaw in 2023 and does so again as Eno’s Gnit. Although Gnit is a compulsive liar, Khan is able to make him seem like an innocent because he shows that Gnit lies both because he is a coward and because the real world is not what he would like it to be. What Khan does especially well is to demonstrate how Gnit gradually loses this innocence and becomes merely callous. Khan has Gnit appear so inured to self-deception that it no longer seems comic but disturbing. It’s too bad Eno omits mention of Gynt’s slave-trading since that would underscore how far Gnit has fallen. When Gnit finally expresses true emotion toward the end, Khan makes us believe that these emotions have been building up throughout the action despite the nonchalant mien Gnit tries to preserve. What Khan misses is Gnit’s gradual ageing throughout the action. Khan does take up a walking stick near the end but his walk and gait are just as vigorous as they were at the start.

Gnit’s opposite, as in Ibsen, is his beloved Solvay (which reflects the Norwegian pronunciation of Ibsen’s “Solveig”). Julia Course is luminous in the role lending Solvay a wistfulness and steadfastness that contrast completely with Gnit’s thoughtlessness and changeability. Course carefully shows how Solvay grows slower and stiffer with ageing while still retaining the grace that sets her apart from all the other female characters. While Gnit tries and fails to find himself by travelling, Solvay comes to ever deeper understanding and acceptance of the world while staying in one place. Course’s five other roles, all clearly distinguished, include a no-nonsense Bartender and a lustful Madwoman.

In her principal role Nehassaiu deGannes gives a wonderfully warm portrait of Gnit’s Mother (given the name Åse in Ibsen). Eno’s text would allow deGannes to put a negative spin on the Mother’s line readings since all she seems to do is lament Gnit’s mendacity and folly. Yet, deGannes speaks these lines not as a criticism but as a rueful and almost amused acknowledgement that Gnit is just the way he is and will never change.

Patrick Galligan plays ten roles, none long enough to count as a principal role. What is so enjoyable is how this circumstance provides Galligan with a fantastic showcase for his talents, exiting as one character and immediately entering as another. He is very funny as a whining Bridegroom whose Bride Gnit has carried off and he is very ominous as the resonant Voice calling himself “Middle” who keeps crossing Gnit’s path. This “Middle” is Eno’s version of Ibsen’s Bøyg (meaning “bend”), a supernatural creature who resists all definition but whom many say is the dark impulse in Peer Gynt that prevents him from commitment.

Gabriella Sundar Singh plays an amazing 11 roles. The most distinctive of these are the pouty Bride, the lusty then heartbroken Woman in Green (i.e., Ibsen’s Troll Princess) and Helen (Helga in Ibsen), Solvay’s kind, gentle sister who looks after her as Solvay begins to lose her sight.

Mike Nadajewski has the strange task of playing three characters who each represent groups of characters. The first of these is the personified Town where Gnit lives. As Town, Nadajewski produces a large number of competing voices as the various member of the Town react to Gnit’s behaviour. Unless you look in the programme, you will have no idea that this is what Nadajewski is doing. It seems as if he is just playing the local psychotic. Nadajewski next plays what Eno calls the “Green Family” (i.e., all the members of the troll community). This is just as confusing as Town since the only character necessary in the action is the Troll Princess’s Father (known in Ibsen as the Mountain King). Further confounding the issue, Nadajewski does nothing to make the Green Family quarrels any different from those in the Town. This similarity might make a point about how troll-like human beings are except that Eno never tells us that the Green Family are trolls. Nadajewski’s third group role is that of four foreign businessmen collected under the name International Man. In Ibsen these are two Englishmen a Frenchman and a German, and Nadajewski skillfully switches from language to language, accent to accent, in presenting the character. But only if you know Ibsen would you realize that Eno had folded four characters into one.

Hanne Loosen’s set consists of a painted floor and seven rust-coloured boxes that the actors rearrange to represent the play’s numerous different locations. Loosen’s real triumph are the extraordinarily imaginative costumes she has created – Town carrying along a trailing coat with little houses on it, International Man in a suit covered in words in different languages, the Troll Princess in a wispy emerald dance outfit wearing a crown of twigs.

What is most peculiar is a design feature that director Tim Carroll must have requested. Suspended over the stage are 18 rust-coloured tubes in a 3x6 matrix. Whenever there is a special effect, like falling leaves, or a prop needed, like the onion, they drop from one of the tubes. This calls attention to the play as a kind of mechanism, but the question is, “To what end?” Eno has deliberately excised anything supernatural from his play, so these objects falling from the sky cannot indicate divine intervention. The tube-delivered objects seem only part of a look-at-me directorial intervention – always an unsatisfying strategy.

Ideally, the Shaw Festival should do something only a festival can do which would be to present Gnit in repertory with Peer Gynt. The danger is, of course, that Eno’s play would then come off as even more superficial and pointless than it already is. I have greatly enjoyed the four other plays by Eno that I’ve seen, but Gnit is the kind of adaptation that makes you want to turn immediately to the source to find out what the story is really about and why it is so famous. The nine-day Peer Gynt Festival in Gudbrandsdalen, Sweden, has staged Ibsen’s play every year since 1967, but, of course, the production is only in Norwegian The Shaw has staged Peer Gynt only once, and that was 36 years ago. Let’s hope the Shaw considers staging the real thing again.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Gabriella Sundar Singh as Anitra and Qasim Khan as Peter Gnit; Mike Nadajewski as Town; Nehassaiu deGannes as Mother and Julia Course as Solvay; Qasim Khan as Peter Gnit © 2025 Michael Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com.