Meet the Young Kiwi Playwright With the Ego to Rewrite Ibsen

Eli Kent's unnervingly tidy beard and reddish-rimmed glasses hovers over a flat white as he gets half way into an answer—leaving the word "like" scattered through his conversation as if each was a breadcrumb he needed to follow out—before, not backing down, but revising slightly with the second half of the statement what has come before. So, when asked how it felt to be regaled as the wunderkind of New Zealand theatre: "It's obviously not a bad thing… but then the New Zealander in me feels gross and weird about it. Whoever said it the first time, I was like, 'I hope not, because then I'm screwed, like a one-hit-wonder kinda thing.'"

There's probably not much danger of that. After leaving his Wellington high school, Eli found near-immediate success with Rubber Turkey, written when he was 19, awarding him a Chapman Tripp Theatre Award. He later won the Bruce Mason Award, New Zealand theatre's most significant. Attracted to theatre rather than, say, film—"there is more scope to be meta"—he followed that early success with a steady stream of work, including the (excellently titled) The Intricate Art of Actually Caring and All Your Wants and Needs Fulfilled Forever. Eli's new play, a reimagining of Henrik Ibsen's 1867 work Peer Gynt, opens at Auckland's new ASB Waterfront Theatre on March 7. He calls it "the biggest thing I've done".

Far more than just an updating of the original Ibsen work, which follows the narcissistic Peer Gynt on his peripatetic travels around the globe, Eli's adaptation sees him "presenting Peer Gynt as a play. Sort of neurotically going like, 'Here's the play, here's what I did' and picking things apart. It goes back and forth between that and bringing people from my life in, and then the two start to merge—and shit gets really weird."

Eli has named the central character after himself, and the play features the character of disgraced troll-of the moment Milo Yiannopoulos. Ibsen, too, shows up, unhappy about what has been done to his masterpiece and trying to get more of his original text back into the work. For Eli, making any art is "really egotistical", but adapting a play "all about ego" by a master like Ibsen—"sacrilegiously doing whatever I want with it"—takes that egocentricity to an even higher plane. "So I had permission to go real nuts, like I talk in the play about my anxieties about the play being… bad."

The egotism in the play is not aimed at the perceived technology-enhanced self-obsession of millennials, Eli says, and is more a critique of the ego of white men. Hence the entrance of Yiannopoulos, Ibsen, a passionate believer in the genius of his own art, and Eli himself.

The playful post modernism of the work aims to get audiences thinking about story-telling and, specifically, about why we swallow some narratives as if they were truths. "There's always this contract you enter into, even when you're doing a realist play. The audience comes and sits in the dark and you're like, 'Here's a living room.' And people are so used to going, 'OK, there's a living room.' What I like to do is go, 'Why, why are you prepared to accept that? That's so weird.'"

That question presages larger ones. "[You can] start to ask the audience questions about the sort of stories they readily accept, which maybe aren't healthy. Which is really, I think, what meta-narrative should do: it should ask people what stories they should be accepting."

Modern life is full of such stories, from our Instagram feeds to reality TV. "True stories are very rarely told with all the truths intact," Eli says. "They're always warped."

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