Review Of ‘Gatz’ At The Project

by Peter Crawley

No one enters into Elevator Repair Service’s almost fabled show lightly, just as no one commits to a seven-and-a-half hour journey on a whim. With a concept as simple as it is preposterous, ‘Gatz’ either captures the imagination or sends you scurrying for safety.

In a cluttered, timeless American workspace, an office drone begins to read ‘The Great Gatsby’ aloud, apropos of very little, and with a trickle that soon becomes a torrent, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story sweeps everyone into its service.

It’s a novel idea, but to avoid becoming a staged read-through, or an endurance test, it must be so much more. The magnificence of John Collins’s production lies not only in its fluency with the 1925 satire and how readily its jaded sensitivity chimes with the present, but also in its evocation of the entrancing act of reading and the competing distractions of reality. It is experimental but deeply reverent, sidestepping the issue of adaptation by including every word, and somehow, like its title, makes Fitzgerald’s story seem more true to itself.

In an office of almost mesmerising drabness (Louisa Thompson’s set is all dishwater greys, dull browns and jagged corners) the book emerges from a rolodex like a genie from a lamp. Performer Scott Shepherd intones from his dog-eared discovery with a warm, dry, but slightly chewed-up delivery. This initially seems like a misstep. Ultimately, it proves masterful.

Fitzgerald’s text is boozy, sardonic, whiskey sour, and Shepherd’s astonishingly unflagging narration as Nick Carraway matches its humane cynicism note for note.

Indeed, just as Fitzgerald defined the jazz age, Collins recognises where the real and fictitious should move in strict counterpoint or easy harmony. Ben Williams’s virtuosic sound design, so essential that he executes it onstage, lets the chatter of New York traffic bleed into the prattle of Long Island crickets, and, as the fiction takes hold, costumes materialise, props appear and the office becomes a living palimpsest with the story roughly inscribed upon it.

That sense of double exposure is important, with every actor swathed in a narration that makes character discrepancies seem more compelling. Here Jim Fletcher, a performer with the physicality and delicacy of a stiff quarterback, makes an oddly satisfying Gatsby because there is continual pleasure for the audience’s imagination in adjusting the narrative around him, or reading between the lines.

But just as an absorbing read mutes the world beyond its pages, when Shepherd reaches his final delivery – after almost a full working day in its company – the office is all but obliterated. As Nick contemplates America’s discovery, untainted by excess, oblivious to approaching roar, he imagines man coming face to face “with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder”. In its innumerable layers, its detail, its wit and generosity, that is precisely what the epic ‘Gatz’ delivers.

View the original article on the Irish Times website here .