New Peer Gynt is entertaining but not satisfying

Peer Gynt (recycled)
Auckland Arts Festival
Director Colin McColl
Auckland Theatre Company
ASB Waterfront Theatre
Until March 18

The first 10 minutes of Eli Kent’s new play Peer Gynt (recycled) are brilliant.

In those 10 minutes, Eli Kent (played by Jack Buchanan) succinctly summed up the Peer Gynt classic, the perils and delights of discovering and reworking the classics and the demands on playwrights to produce relevant works and dialogue both for themselves and their audience.

The play itself has all the ingredients of being a brilliant play – witty, dialogue, consummate actors, cool set (John Parker) and costumes (Nic Smillie), clever use of digital; media (Simon Barker) Great lighting (Bryan Caldwell), fabulous sound (Eden Mulholland) and Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt to use as a starting point.

But the play doesn’t hold together, has no emotional density or rewarding narrative. There is much sound and noise, signifying nothing. The play is immensely entertaining but not satisfying.

I’d go again for the opening 10 minutes. I’d also go for the last 10 minutes of the first half as well when a bunch of protestors from the Henrik Ibsen Appreciation Society who had travelled up from Wellington and took to the stage at the end of the first half to abuse Mr Kent for his misrepresenting Ibsen.

Kent creates a weird episodic realm, which moves from the contemporary to the surreal to the playwright's own internal universe with changing scenes and audacious characters. There is also a changing dialogue, which ranges from normal to the surreal as fiction and reality merge and split

This shifting bizarre dialogue manages to give a sense of characters floundering in their fracturing worlds, trying to make sense of their relationships and purpose, searching for meaning.

However, a lot of the time the dialogue and the story lines seem to be clever one-liners that get out of control and we are presented with a mass of words that seem to have no structure.

Eli Kent may have managed to whittle Ibsen’s original five-hour work down to three and a half but it could probably have another hour or so shaved off it.