A man enters his office in the morning, finds his computer on the fritz and, after a few attempts to turn it on and off again, comes across a copy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. So he starts to read and when his colleagues enter they find themselves taking on the characters, and soon the novel unfolds around us, word by word. The New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service has produced a work that is not quite adaptation – given it doesn’t really adapt the novel at all – but that is utterly transfixing nonetheless.
Following a keen interest in non-dramatic texts, the company wanted to see what would happen when a powerful literary work was read and performed in its entirety. The result is both strange and strangely familiar. It feels sometimes like listening to the greatest audio book ever read, or attending a live recording of a particularly effective radio play. Eventually it’s as if the audience has gathered at the foot of their favourite primary school teacher while they read us their favourite book. It’s eight and a half hours of completely attentive, fully immersive joy.
Gatz establishes a narrative model – actors toggling between their office personas and those of the novel’s characters – but then undermines or upends it at every turn. One performer inexplicably carries that faulty computer on and off stage all night, as if he’s a dodgy repairman with a side hustle. The sound technician on the side of the stage steps suddenly into the action, sometimes as a peripheral character but other times as a surly sound technician. A googly eyed puppet is briefly employed to play a child. Just as we begin to think we understand the rules, the production changes them.
It’s a conceit that probably wouldn’t work – or at least would work very differently – with any other novel. Gatsby is lauded for its exquisite prose, and its narrator, Nick Carraway (Scott Shepherd), is an ideal guide; sharply observant, deeply compassionate and multifaceted, he plays a key role in the action but also remains aloof and dispassionate. As an audience surrogate, he’s indispensable.
Shepherd is staggering in the role. His vocal cadences, the suppleness and surgical precision of his delivery, the urbane wit and casual profundities, all combine to astonishing effect, so that the words both drift by in pleasurable phrasal ribbons and land with devastating accuracy. For the most part kindly and avuncular, Shepherd also mines a serious vein of disgust and moral torpor. It’s a Nick Carraway for the ages.
Other actors also make memorable contributions, from Jim Fletcher’s seriously against-type Gatsby – young and impossibly handsome in the novel, bald and over 60 on stage – to Lucy Taylor’s brittle and damaged Daisy. Frank Boyd and Laurena Allan are excellent as the tragically manipulated George and Myrtle Wilson, and Susie Sokol makes a hilariously droll Jordan Baker, the professional golfer with a penchant for lies, liquor and licentiousness. John Collins directs the ensemble with complete control of mood and pacing.
Time and money are the two key processes working on the characters of Fitzgerald’s novel, and this production underlines them in intriguing ways. In keeping with the idea of the “future that year by year recedes before us”, Louisa Thompson’s office setting is oddly anachronistic – not just shabby, it seems to belong to a recognisable but retrograde era, full of typewriters and fake wood panelling. And while the milieu is ostensibly ultra-wealthy, Colleen Werthmann’s costumes are decidedly low-rent.
The production is more interested in challenging the text rather than simply illustrating it, in mining the spaces between the theatrical and the novelistic. Characters seem to hear and understand what Shepherd is reading, an impossibility in the world of the novel but curiously effective on stage. And the fact that Gatz is performed by a cast of “employees” in an almost scuzzy working environment, undercuts the world of privilege the novel is interrogating. Gatz manages simultaneously to be exceedingly deferential and thrillingly subversive.
The Great Gatsby might not carry the same cultural weight in Australia as it does in the US, where it exposes something awful about the national character, but this production makes a case for it as a universal warning. The “careless people” who smash things and move on have only become more venal and more powerful, and Nick Carraway’s vigilant humanism, his sobering and poetic sensibility, reads like a benediction not just for a lost age but for our future.
Gatz runs until 15 March at Her Majesty’s theatre, as part of the Adelaide festival
