'Gatz' by Elevator Repair Service

‘Nick’ begins reading in a staccato fashion, clipped, direct, without emotion.  His computer is down and in the quiet drabness of his unidentifiable office someone has left a battered copy of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

After reading several pages aloud and receiving confused looks from his co-workers at his different voices for the characters one surprises him by joining him as the line falls from his lips.  The boss and secretary come and go bemused by the actions of the pair but, in time, each has been drawn into the story.

The beauty of the production is the slow and steady transformation of the office.   Initially ‘Nick’ at his desk is alone in describing the scene and action; the whirl of Myrtle and Tom’s apartment pulls more of the office into the frivolity and, when we reach Gatsby’s wild parties, Nick’s co-workers have been totally absorbed into the novel’s different characters whether they match Fitzgerald’s descriptions of them or not.  The cardboard carton stuffed shelves become the elaborate library; the small reception desk the wild kitchen; a permanently manned corner desk of the office is the sound technician cum butler, slamming Gatsby’s door in Nick’s face with a casual tap of his keyboard.

 

Where once the boss’s broken typewriter carriage hinted at the mention of distant bells the scenes become more literal with donated shirts being hurled from filing cabinets.  Daisy’s cry of their beauty with her face buried in them reveals more about her love for Gatsby when done here surreally than it ever did written down.  As we reach the latter stages, the book is placed on the desk. Instead of an ugly workplace with nervous workers there is now a living piece of New York in the Jazz-age and the transformed characters are living words where once they merely spoke them.  Five people are strewn around an office’s torn seats and shabby tables but the audience are living excess and despair in the roaring-twenties; it’s magical theatre.

Elevator Repair Service have battled to bring their imagining of ‘The Great Gatsby’ to the stage and have been attempting it since 1999.  Where they initially tried a straight interpretation akin to the many films and other adaptations in existence they found the spirit of the novel in its prose.  The long narrations, the quick retorts and descriptions of scenes that lose their impact when merely presented visually or cut for time.  Unhappy with removing anything they decided to do something unusual and use every word.  Every sentence of the novel is presented, unaltered and aloud.

Where it sounds ridiculously simple and is described in the programme as "a reading" that doesn’t do it justice.  The only extra dialogue comes in the almost imperceptible background murmur of office workers, a song only mentioned in the novel is sung, and the snap back to reality when ‘Nick’ announced where we’d reached so far and when to return to the theatre. Entering the Nöel Coward at half-past two there are two fifteen minute intervals and a break of seventy-five minutes to grab dinner nearby; I left that evening at ten minutes to eleven.

Seeing Gatsby brought to life here made me see things that I hadn’t in the novel, the wit and incredible humour of some of the scenes, the dialogue so crisp and fast-paced.  The preface to Gatsby and Daisy’s meeting at Nick’s crackles with a tenseness that I hadn’t felt before.  In the same vein the ending feels long and not as punchy as it may be if it were adapted but it’s the last ten minutes of an incredible journey and they succeed so incredibly where I feel that the other stage productions and films are doomed to fail.  Through it all it’s Nick voice that makes the novel come alive not Gatz or his subsequent reinvention as the great Gatsby.