One morning in the shabby office of a mysterious small business, an employee finds a copy of The Great Gatsby in the clutter on his desk. He starts to read it out loud and doesn't stop. At first his coworkers hardly notice. But after a series of strange coincidences, it's no longer clear whether he's reading the book or the book is transforming him.
Part of Lift Festival
Reviews
The Stage
Mark Shenton
“Reading a book - or having one read to you - has never been this effortless, at least for the audience, who surrender readily to such gorgeous storytelling. The actors, inevitably, have to work a bit harder, not least Scott Shepherd as the narrator. Although he is ‘on book’ for much of the evening, he flies free of its pages regularly, and certainly for the final hour or so. Shepherd brings a sweet affability and vulnerability to the stage that connects him both to the story he is telling and his own role as both participant in it as well as conduit of it.”
14/06/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Dominic Cavendish
“What, you can't help thinking, would Noel Coward, master of swift, succinct comedies, make of such a laborious-sounding proposition landing at the venue named in his honour? Actually, I dare venture that Coward would have been mighty taken with this jaunty, jazzily experimental marathon, much lauded since it trialled seven years ago. The company comes to excavate The Great Gatsby not to bury it in pretension. Their version has considerable wit, a consequence of Fitzgerald's epigrammatic style and the constantly inventive input of director John Collins and his cast. It glories in the power of theatre, as Coward did. And it also seems custom-built to withstand - and win over - the coolest English scepticism.”
14/06/2012
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The Evening Standard
Henry Hitchings
“The interpretation brings to the surface the novel’s humour (which can easily be overlooked). It’s layered, intelligent, inventive and never afraid of slowness, pensiveness, a quiet literariness. It’s eloquent, too, about the fragile business of storytelling. The performance gets off to a very slow start, and there are passages that feel a little flat. This isn’t theatre for the faint of heart or weak of spine. But it is an epic achievement — and a tribute to the greatness of Fitzgerald’s novel.”
14/06/2012
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The Guardian
Michael Billington
“For all the brilliance of Jim Fletcher's embodiment of the self-created Gatsby, the mere act of impersonation robs him of some of the elusiveness that makes him a great fictional character. The mock-Homeric recitation of the list of his party guests is also obscured by an overlay of jazz music. But the central idea of the book still emerges with great clarity. The careless, self-pleasuring world of Tom and Daisy Buchanan is contrasted with the nostalgic yearning for some lost ideal that is the secret of both Gatsby and the narrating Nick. Above all, this staging beautifully captures the elegiac tone of the book with its sense of the dissolving, essentially agrarian American Dream.”
14/06/2012
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The Observer
Susannah Clapp
“The show's deepest interest is surprising. You go in expecting to see a version of the American dream – and you do – but Gatz also projects another dream: the one that comes over us when we read. This is, above all, a play about what happens when we sink into a book, when readers' and writers' worlds create a new population.
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17/06/2012
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The Sunday Times
Maxie Szakwinska
“You could just read the novel, but this remarkable staging tears down the wall between theatre, audio drama and the solitary, expansive pleasures of reading. ”
17/06/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Kate Bassett
“The snag is that the office relationships are underdeveloped and there's a kind of Brechtian alienation at work (every exchange being punctuated with "he said" and "she said"). One starts to feel the emotional surface is only skimmed, particularly by contrast with Rattigan's interwar heartbreaker, After the Dance.
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17/06/2012
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The Independent
Paul Taylor
“Fitzgerald's subtle ambivalence is, for the most part, crudely divided between relentless slapstick and Nick the reader's infatuation with the novel. It is paradoxical that this extravagantly over-hyped show becomes genuinely moving only towards the end when Nick jettisons the book and speaks to us directly in defiant solidarity with the slaughtered Gatsby against the closing ranks of the callous rich. Before that, it can feel like a bit of an endurance test.”
14/06/2012
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The Times
Libby Purves
“Noël would also be unlikely to ask an audience for eight hours of concentration on one set representing a gloomy, rundown office. He would certainly frown at certain passages of ultra-natural, head-down reading from the book by the narrator, some of which can hardly have been audible in the back circle. His ghost sometimes mutters “Very flat, Long Island . . .” But he might be won by the eccentric playfulness of ERS, and anyone can honour their passion for refusing to lose a word of the evocative prose. ”
14/06/2012
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