GATZ

There are no rules - at least, no sufficient ones - to making a good artwork. What this means is that any good work at art has a profound kind of originality about it. It emerges from the world but it brings something new to it, something that was not predicted by it or entirely contained within it. Art is in a certain restricted sense otherworldly. What this also perhaps means is that any really good piece of theatre is unimaginable to its audience.

I had a specific instance of this with GATZ, which is a show I’ve found very hard to imagine. I think I first heard about the show five years ago and ever since have  had two equal but somewhat contradictory responses to it: first, I’ve really wanted to see it; second, whichever way people describe it, it sounded to me really boring. The show comprises the complete text of The Great Gatsby, read aloud by what appears to be an office worker, with colleagues occasionally joining in to stand in for (not quite ‘play’) other characters. It’s around six hours long plus three intervals and a dinner break.

Why might I find it boring? Because it sounded like there’s not much to look at. Because it sounded like it might be reverential in a classic. Because I sometimes try to listen to audiobooks and always get distracted, miss my place and give up. Because I might find myself thinking, I’d rather just read it. Because it just might be long.

So why did I want to see it? Because people were raving about it. I was intrigued by it. Because I also thought of it as a kind of footnote to verbatim, sharing both that claim of unmediated fidelity (‘every printed word in the 9 chapters of the novel’ boasts the website) and a kind of hostility to fiction and theatricality; I thought I’d read an interview where the company had claimed that it was impossible to ‘adapt’ The Great Gatsby. Actually, I despair of that attitude and it was another reason why I thought I might find it boring. Nonetheless, it seemed something working through contradiction which is a state in which interesting work is often made and, hey, I reasoned, at least I’d get reacquainted with The Great Gatsby.

On all counts, I couldn’t have been more wrong. First, it’s never boring. Amazingly, it just never is. The Great Gatsby, obvious though this is to say, is a terrific book: zips along, is often very funny, brims with feeling, and digs into a mysterious failure in the heart of success, finds the sadness in being who we are. I read the book when I was 15; liked it, kind of didn’t get it, but found the plot, such as I formed it, enjoyable. I don’t know if my vague recollection of the story 24 hours ago reflected just the decay of memory or the contours of the story that affected me at the time. Until reacquainting myself with the novel in the theatre yesterday, I recalled a story about a rich man with a troubled soul who held big parties; I also remembered a garage off a highway and a car accident. Weirdly I hadn’t remembered that Gatsby dies, nor that he was a fraud (or bootlegger, or fantasist, or criminal, or whatever ultimately we think he is). His sad, sad funeral (‘All the mourners travelled in one car’ as Lambchop sung on another occasion) seems to have passed me by. But the idea of an empty man, hollowed out by deception and loss, either didn’t touch me as a teenager or spoke to me so much I swerved to avoid it as it ran out into the road.

Second, I also never stopped giving it my attention. It takes a while, maybe 20 minutes, to adjust to the experience. We are looking at a mundane office. Racks of document boxes to the right, a private office to the left, a table in the middle, sofa towards the back. Doors right and left. An office worker comes in with a coffee, takes off his coat, settles himself down, taps a key on his keyboard but his computer does not respond. He tries again. Turns it off, counts to ten, turns it back on again. It still does not respond. He turns it off and on again. No response. He tries once more. Nothing. Other office workers have come in. Roaming around his desk for something more analogue to work on, he opens his Rolodex and there, oddly, sitting up and begging, is a worn copy of The Great Gatsby.

He opens the book and reads aloud the first sentence: ‘In my younger and more vulnerable days my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since...’ The office worker (Scott Shepherd) looks bemused at the page, as if he’s never seen the words before, but also as if he’s startled by what it feels like to say those words aloud, to hear his own voice uttering those words in the low-level banality of the office. So he carries on. Scott speaks the words slowly - wait, no he doesn’t, because it never feels slow. He gives the words space in the mouth and he gives us time to enjoy them but also to enjoy him enjoying them, or being puzzled by them, being excited by them. Initially, the colleagues seem tolerantly amused by his curious project; there are moments where, serendipitously, as they go about their mundane office work, they seem to be echoing images, moments, attitudes from the story, phones go off, magazines are read, someone stands at a certain moment. Then one of them starts to join in, mockingly; another speaks the words of Tom Buchanan - maybe he knows the book, maybe he was in a school play version; everyone is intrigued, perplexed, but delighted. Soon, whole scenes are being created in the office. Then the office seems to recede from our attention and we appear to be on Long Island. In the very final phase, the attention returns to the lone office worker, who closes the book and now recites the words directly to us and from memory, leading to that extraordinary final paragraph. ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’. What all of this does is give a compelling but oddly restful shape to the day. You’re given clear, simple stage pictures that anchor the situations, underpin the emotional shape of the novel, and, increasingly, ask complicated questions about the novel.

Because, third, this is the key thing: it’s absolutely not a production that is hostile to fiction or theatricality. It’s very theatrical and it’s very fictional. The office is not a neutral, perfunctory space, except that it performs perfunctoriness. The office is specifically placed in the 1980s, I’m guessing at a moment of transition from paper documents to digital documents, in which the quixotic project of reading a novel aloud becomes fraught with historical meaning. When Scott ‘finds’ The Great Gatsby he has just been doing battle with a computer; he finds the book and he looks at it as though at an alien object. He handles it with amusement, this clumsy analogue, linear object, with its rudimentary operating system, negligible data capacity, lack of compression and unwriteability. When he reads the first lines of the book, his startled response is almost that of someone with an iMac managing to get data off a 5” floppy. The office also amplifies and places the life of the narrator, who observes at one moment:

Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.
   Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust.

It enriches our sense of Nick as, in his way, as much of an adventurer as Gatsby, finding romances, conspiracies and thrillers in his lunch breaks and after work. It keeps in your retina the dull everyday of New York and the East Coast from which the parties, the adulteries, the rumours and escapades are on a doomed mission to escape.

But then - and this is where it became so interesting in its play with text - it’s not sneaking a conventional adaptation on us. Nothing could be cheesier than an adaptation of a novel where someone starts reading it aloud and, as if under an enchantment, the actors find themselves magically transformed into the characters. There’s no transformation here. As the reading starts to unfold, I found myself unsure whether I was making the connections between the book and the events onstage, so slight, so glancing were they. It feels purposeful but not rigid. And this tone is maintained throughout. Often we are tripped up by the failure of the stage image to reflect the book; when Klipspringer is summoned from his bed to play piano for Gatsby’s guests, we hear him described as ‘an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blonde hair’. Some of this is borne out in the figure we see before us, but he has thick medium-length straight dark hair. Early in his acquaintance with Gatsby, Nick describes ‘his short hair [which] looked as though it were trimmed every day’. In the private office, behind glass, our Gatsby stand-in, Jim Fletcher, stands with his back to us, looking up, showing off his bald crown.

Jim Fletcher’s Gatsby is one of the most fascinating things about this production. First, because he’s not playing Gatsby. He is strikingly unlike Gatsby; he has little of the charm of Gatsby. Nick refers often to his seductive smile - ‘one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life’, ‘people liked him when he smiled’, ‘that radiant and understanding smile’ - but Fletcher’s smile is a wintry and sinister grimace. Gatsby impresses everyone with his elegance of dress, his shirts sent over from England, his  pink suit. Jim Fletcher’s gaudy chain-store shirts and awkwardly-cut, mismatching pink jacket and trousers raise a laugh when he first appears and signals to us the failed aspirations and delusions of the man before the plot stumbles upon them. His performance asks questions about what acting is, because the best way I can think of describing the show’s attitude to performance as that Jim Fletcher is ‘standing in for’ Gatsby. But even that is not right. First, because he’s ‘playing’ another office worker, standing in for Gatsby, Gatsby held at two fastidious removes from the actor. But second because I know Jim Fletcher from various New York City Players shows like Boxing 2000, Showcase, and The End of Reality, where his tall, ungainly presence is both broodingly mysterious and absurd. He brings a preposterous enigma to Gatsby, the actor lending some of his own persona to the part, as do all actors. But he does so without seeming to do so physically, even visible or audibly. His voice, slightly clotted, thickly-accented suggests someone who’d struggle to appear a jazz-age sophisticate, though here he doesn’t struggle because he isn’t trying. He is Gatsby without acting him.

If there’s anything anti-theatrical about this deeply theatrical production, it’s something akin to that worry people have when a favourite novel is adapted: it’s not like the pictures in my head. This production does not try to replace the pictures in your head or in your memory. If your Gatsby is Robert Redford or Leonardo di Caprio or an imagined fantasy casting of Orson Welles or some indeterminate mental image, that figure remains in play. What the show does is ask questions about is what a novel is, what theatrical representation is, what a mental image is, and how these three things converge on The Great Gatsby. The novel is about a world of hollow desperate barely-maintained pretence, this production gives us this world in all its thinness. The title GATZ refers to Jay Gatsby’s name before he changed it in a moment of theatrical reinvention and performance. This is Gatsby before Gatsby, theatre not bringing the expected shallow facade out of the novel, but the opposite.

I’ve made it sound like a rather more conceptual experience than it is. It doesn’t feel like a particularly experimental show and you could just sit there and enjoy the novel. The day is sumptuously enjoyable. To a very great extent it’s because Scott Shepherd holds the narrative with mischievous authority; we feel supremely confident in this storyteller; we share, to an extent, in his endurance test. And we relax into the arms of an extraordinary novel and experience that great pleasure of having a great story told to us expertly. But there’s something very rich about this type of telling that means my memories of the show are already uncertain, caught between stage image and mental image, neither complete, both gesturing towards the novel, always out of reach.