Observations: A Joyful Day In The Company Of The Great Gatsby

by Larry Ryan

At 3pm an actor enters a stage that is fastidiously designed like a 1980s office and sits at a desk. When his computer won’t start, he rifles around the cluttered desk and happens across a copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’. He begins reading it aloud, in a flat tone: “In my younger and more vulnerable years…” At about half past 10 the same evening he reaches the book’s immortal conclusion. The audience rises in appreciation — in one of the few ovations for which I have also unreservedly stood.

This was ‘Gatz’, the epic production by the New York theatre company, Elevator Repair Service, which ran last week in the Dublin Theatre Festival. The show has been staged in America and around Europe to great acclaim, but a rights dispute meant it was only briefly staged at invitation-only performances in New York. The same problem currently precludes it from the London stage too.

It lasts seven and a half hours, with two intervals and an hour-long dinner break — theatre as cricket match. Mercifully there was free espresso on hand, though barely a moment of the show flagged. Unsurprisingly, it was not a sell-out and the empty seats allowed one to comfortably stretch out.

The actor, Scott Shepherd, reads the entire book, taking on the persona of the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, with more actors, initially playing surrounding office workers, becoming the other characters. Every single “he said” and “she said” is left in. Shepherd, it seems, knows the entire book by rote — for the final 30 minutes he closes it and recites from memory.

This could be mere event theatre gimmickry or mind-gnawingly boring, but every aspect of the production is so brilliantly conceived and executed that all doubts are overcome. Perhaps there are better ways to spend a weekend. Maybe you could just read the book again, or watch the film, or listen to an audio version. Regardless, for seven and half hours on a day when American politicians struggled to agree on a deal that they claimed would preserve the “American Dream”, F Scott Fitzgerald’s immaculate portrait of the Roaring Twenties came gloriously alive for me.