“But it does take a certain temerity to see yourself at the centre of it all.”
This line, wryly delivered by the long-suffering sort-of heroine Solvay, offers a kind of thesis for Gnit, Will Eno’s sly and absurdist riff on Henrik Ibsen’s hours-long verse drama Peer Gynt.
Making its Canadian debut at the Shaw Festival, this minimalist, funny, cheekily self-aware production directed by Tim Carroll is both a parody and a meditation on the search for the authentic Self. It’s a meta-quest, in which the journey matters less than the many digressions, and dead ends, and the dizzying array of personalities encountered along the way.
At the centre of it all is Peter Gnit. (“It’s a typo…but we decided to just go with it,” we are told of the name and its pronunciation.) He is a modern-day Peer, who is blessed with the soul of a wanderer and the attention span of a goldfish. “This is the moment. This is what I believe, now,” he proclaims — until, of course, something shinier comes along in the next “now”. The picaresque plot loosely follows Ibsen’s original: Peter abandons his bitter yet wise dying mother (Nehassaiu DeGannes), then he crashes a wedding and abducts the bride (Gabriella Sundar Singh). He abandons her in the woods, marries a mysterious Woman in Green, and fathers a child before meeting the aforementioned Solvay (Julia Course) who is the love of his life. Of course, he then leaves her, too: for 30 years of restless wandering, while Solvay waits for him. He winds up in Morocco, gets robbed of his wealth, speaks to the Sphinx, visits a madhouse in Egypt, and eventually stumbles home.
He is older, but is he wiser? Or even changed? And what, it must be asked, is the point of all of this? The script often recalls Beckett and Ionesco—not just in its absurd logic, but in its sparseness and repetition, and in its moments of sideways logical surprise and profound nonsense. The overall effect of the production is both surreal and pointed: with an inflection that wavers between arch irony and lachrymose melancholy. And while some may crave more emotional heft, it’s precisely the show’s deadpan detachment that gives Gnit its dry punch.
Khan is the linchpin of this production with a performance that is both irritatingly charismatic and deliberately evasive. The Byronic hero Khan’s Peter is not. He is equal parts cautionary tale and clown, wrapped in a Peewee Herman-like bow tie and tee-hee smirk, He is always moving, always speaking, always side-stepping, and rarely listening — except to his own voice – with a devil-may-care shrugging nonchalance. If he loves his mother, it doesn’t show – he leaves her. If he loves Solvay, he proves it only by also leaving her behind. And when he finally returns, full of “really successful relationships” and stories from abroad, we have to wonder: has he actually changed?
This rhetorical question – along with other existential and metaphysical ones – haunts the edges of the play. Even Solvay, who is steadfast and certain, carries an edge of weary knowing. She stays in the house Peter built for them, doing Penelope-like knitting. But her patience is laced with quiet irony. As she tells him, “Being a person is so wild” – a pronouncement that is at once silly and profound, and resonates much more widely.
The five-person ensemble also includes Mike Nadajewski, Patrick Galligan and the aforementioned Singh, who navigate their multiple, quick-change roles with impressive versatility. Nadajewski is wildly funny and especially memorable as “Town,” a chorus of quirky townsfolk merged into a single, shape-shifting, self-talking character. Galligan shifts easily and regularly between figures of authority and absurdity – and Sundar Singh dazzles in her transformation from runaway bride into a succession of women whom Peter meets on his travels. This fluidity begs the question of whether Gnit is as much about the people in Peter’s periphery, pulled in and discarded, then reimagined in the next moment.
The set, designed by Hanne Loosen (who also designed the costumes), appears simple at first: just a few wooden boxes that the actors arrange and rearrange to represent various locations. (Is this a cheeky nod to minimalist Scandinavian self-assembly?) But at various junctures, props drop out of hollow pipes hanging vertically from the fly system, like organ pipes or the pneumatic tubes once used to catapult bills to cash registers. These pipes supply just the right objects – functional or set-establishing – at just the right moments. And their appearance adds to the suggestive sense of Peter being everywhere yet nowhere at once: of time passing and scenes shifting, yet very little truly changing.
Visually, the stripped-down set and surreal mood are elevated by Kevin Lamotte’s lighting, which subtly shifts tones and fades to black for key encounters in (and with) the Middle, during Peter’s long journey. Loosen’s costume design delivers a delightful and ever-shifting parade of wigs and outfits that the actors slip in and out of, in order to distinguish each character while maintaining the production’s spare aesthetic.
Ultimately, watching Gnit is fascinating and a little unnerving: like viewing our obsession with individualism and authenticity through the reverse end of the telescope. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, the play uses the example of Peter to ask us who we are, when we think we have only ourselves to please.
And while it may not offer redemption for Peter, it offers us a gently jarring and useful warning: of the limits of self-knowledge and the pursuit of experience, and the toll of living at the centre of our own story for too long.
Gnit runs at the Shaw Festival’s Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre through October 4, 2025. Tickets are available on shawfest.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
