The Great Gatsby In The Theatre: A Brilliant Marathon

***** (5/5 stars)

by Rita Martins

The New York company Elevator Repair Service invites the audience to see a six-hour show, the time that corresponds to the unabridged reading of Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby.

With courage and determination, we head for Culturgest and gratefully look at the cushions on the chairs, essential to soften possible physical pain caused by this true theatrical marathon.

Surprise and curiosity fill the early moments when, blatantly opposed to the sophisticated atmosphere of Fitzgerald’s “roaring twenties”, we see a gloomy, obsolete-looking office as a set; in that disorganized space, on an indefinite decade of the 20th century, a clerk (Scott Shepherd) begins his working day struggling against a computer that won’t start, and begins to read The Great Gatsby out loud. Life at the office is set in motion, people go in and out, with more or less identifiable occupations — a security guard, a secretary, a maintenance guy — and, almost imperceptibly, the clerks gestures start to intrude on their co-worker’s reading, that is, on the narrative of Nick, the witness of Gatsby’s tragic life. The interplay between the stage fiction and the literary one continues to manifest itself with subtlety: first through the occasional coincidence of described movements and expressions, then through the appropriation of lines, and finally the dialogue becomes the actors’, allowing for scenes that are hilarious, tragic, sinister, moving.

The immense reading is set up slowly and patiently during the first part, in what the actors call the “Scary Section.” And it is indeed from suspicion that the commitment to go along with the marathon is born. It grows on you. Dragged into the game, the audience become an absolute accomplice and deliver themselves, without a struggle, to the immense pleasure of this complex performance. In the hands of Scott Shepherd’s narrative flow, imagination is let loose, conceives sets, atmospheres, walks through spaces; watching the show, we see clerks from a small office unfolding as the literary characters. The two fictional levels remain intact, the set doesn’t change and the actors/clerks resist the metamorphosis, which allows for games to be done and undone, to play with conventions, to provoke distances or create sympathies. Intelligence and irony, allied to the performers’ dexterity and mathematical precision of gestures are seductive until the end. The outcome is a brilliant paradox — the show is at once entirely literary and entirely theatrical. And as always when we finish a great novel it is reluctantly that we leave the characters from the book, the characters from the office, the phenomenal actors and actresses that kept us company for so long in such intimate complicity.