← Back to portfolio
"GATZ" at the Novello Theatre
Published on 3rd September 2013
With the floodgates for adaptations of Fitzgerald’s most famous novel having been opened by the expiration of the copyright period, the fundamental problem with any adaptation has become repeatedly manifest. The romantic, Romantic, and moonlight-silver prose is just as important an aspect of the novel as its analysis of the American psyche, and cut-and-paste dialogue adaptations have always fallen flat for me. This eight hour adaptation, though, uses every word of the text, as a bored office worker with a broken computer finds an old copy in a battered Rolodex and starts reading it aloud to his colleagues, who gradually morph into the various characters, conjuring up the debauched inhabitants of 1920s New York. A female worker practising a golf-swing becomes Jordan Baker, a surly delivery man transmutes into the virile, supercilious Tom Buchanan, and the reader becomes the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway. Whilst the metamorphosis is slick, it means that Scott Shepherd as Carraway has to clamber through layer after layer of narrative – the actor who directly addresses the audience, becomes the office worker who finds the text, becomes Nick after the events of the novel, becomes Nick during the events of the novel – the structure is as awkward as it sounds. However, Shepherd captures (and parodies) Nick’s awkward, inhibited humour, managing to render the interplay between narrative loci engaging and light. The setting in a shabby, run-down office is also interesting, jarring with the glamour so memorably evoked in the novel, perhaps symbolising the decay of Fitzgerald’s New York, his America even, into drab, dingy offices populated by workers in dead-end jobs. This setting quickly dissolves as we are swept away by the magic of the text and Mark Barton’s harsh but somehow alluring lighting – think Edward Hopper, but doused in moonlight. The creation of the claustrophobic apartment is masterful – someone pulls a bottle of whisky from a filing cabinet, all the actors are crushed into centre stage, and the floor becomes littered with sheaves of paper thrown high into the air before falling to smother the Bacchanalian scene. The description of Gatsby’s lavish party is tarnished by the chaos in which the stage is left, thus effortlessly linking the fun and carefree drunkenness of that party with the not-so-fun and carefree drunkenness of that which precedes it. The real challenge, though, for this or any visual adaptation, is the portrayal of Gatsby himself – in the novel, everything we hear about him (initially very little) is filtered through Nick, and the titular character’s share of direct speech is enigmatically small. The very title is a reference to this narrative mode - there is an element of the escapologist in his portrayal, his cryptic appearances and disappearances making him impossible to pin down, lending him an ethereal symbolic significance. So sitting in a theatre, looking at Gatsby’s face, listening to words coming out of Gatsby’s mouth, immediately wipes out much of Fitzgerald’s intention for him – another problem for visual adaptations. GATZ completely sidesteps this problem by rendering Gatsby (Jim Fletcher) a semi-autistic clown in a pink suit. They hide from the daunting task of recreating Gatsby on stage behind a wall of gags about Fletcher’s baldness. The essential life of Gatsby is utterly slain by this company’s laugh-a-minute portrayal of him, and it was painful to watch – I imagine that the number of audience members laughing was inversely proportionate to the number who had actually read the book. One of the most chilling, surreal and yet tender moments of the novel, the scene where Gatsby shows Daisy around his lavish home, was utterly torn to pieces as a pantomime Gatsby pulled out a ha-ha-hilarious selection of animal-print shirts, provoking bestial shrieks of laughter. When the re-uniting of Gatsby and Daisy was reduced to a slapstick comedy sequence involving a Finnish housemaid and a plastic fish, I was practically close to tears – the incapability of modern Americans to understand their greatest literature is a gut-wrenching tragedy. It does, however, make sense – when 84% of Americans still believe that theirs is the greatest country in the world, Fitzgerald’s shattering of the American dream hurts. The wasteland of the valley of ashes, godless save for the cult commercialism symbolised by the all-seeing eyes of Dr TJ Eckleburg, is hard to stomach for a nation that is coming to terms with the fact that, despite its self-conception as leader of the free world, comes seventh in global rankings of literacy rates, twenty-seventh in basic mathematical aptitude, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, fourth in labor force, and fourth in exports. The last thing this declining power wants is for its vision of freedom and opportunity to be deflated, so they run away from the piercing message of Gatsby, muffling its crystal-clear prose with asinine joking. The most effective parts of this production were its final moments – in the dark, now bare office, Nick sits alone as the dawn hardens around him, his voice cracking as he reads, to the audience, those famous last lines. If it had been 8 hours of that, the production would have been delicious. A ticket to GATZ cost £90 pounds, an audio-book costs £6 – as we are so often told by our friends across the water, you do the math.
