Gnit
Shaw Festival 2025
Photo: Michael Cooper
Shaw Festival 2025/Gnit by Will Eno, directed by Tim Carroll, Studio Theatre, closes October 4.
Playwright Will Eno is on record as saying, “I’m interested in the mystery of being a person and how fragile and ridiculous and beautiful it is.”
No wonder he was attracted to Peer Gynt. In his program note for the Shaw Festival production of Gnit, Eno reflects on the confounding nature of the original and his admiration for Ibsen’s ambition — namely, to write an anti-hero who stood in stark contrast to the glorified nationalistic heroes of 19th-century Scandinavian literature.
Peer Gynt — and Peter Gnit — are narcissists who live entirely for personal pleasure, evade responsibility, and leave emotional carnage in their wake. They claim to be searching for their true self, while doing everything possible to avoid confronting who they really are.
Eno brilliantly mirrors the architecture of Ibsen’s episodic 1867 verse drama with its plethora of scenes, but in a thoroughly modern voice, and with a fair measure of ironic humor. At one point, when someone asks Peter how he got the name “Gnit,” he replies, “It was a typo” — easily one of the best lines in the show.
While paying homage to the original in terms of Peer/Peter’s character, Eno has gone beyond Ibsen and turned Peter’s Journey into a damning satiric view of today’s society. Ibsen’s verse drama was a character study. Eno’s Gnit is much more.
Only six actors are used in the Shaw Festival production. Of those, only one —Qasim Khan as Peter Gnit — plays a single role. He gives a wonderfully infuriating performance, embodying the breezy bravado, emotional superficiality, and slippery narcissism that defines the character. His Peter floats through the world convinced that everything exists to support his whims— yet by the end, when he returns home, it’s unclear if he’s truly changed. He may appear broken, but has he learned anything?
The original Peer Gynt had 40 named characters. Will Eno has 35 in Gnit and the ensemble — Julia Course, Nehassaiu deGannes, Patrick Galligan, Mike Nadajewski, and Gabriella Sundar Singh — play them all between them, and moreover, each one is fully realized.
Julia Course, for instance, who plays the serene and soulful Solvay, also gets to show off her skills in the sharply contrasting roles of a bartender, an auctioneer, and a gravedigger among others.
Gnit is a true showcase of the formidable Shaw ensemble’s Thesbian strength.
Set designer Hanne Loosen used a minimalistic concept of large wooden packing crates, which were cleverly rearranged to form different environments throughout Peter’s journey. The simplicity of the crates was extremely effective— creating both spatial fluidity and emotional abstraction. Claudio Vena’s brilliant original music mirrored the emotional tone of the scenes: neither cheerful nor mournful, but following its own oblique path, much like Peter himself.
Tim Carroll directed with a deft hand, manoeuvring the cast to not only organize the packing crates as needed, but also to produce their different characters seamlessly one to the other.
This Gnit was a rare chance for the Shaw Festival to stage the work of an important American playwright and to reflect, through Eno’s lens, one of Europe’s towering literary classics. The production was theatrical, thought-provoking, ironic, and often deeply moving.
A satisfying and scintillating experience all round.