F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is set on Long Island’s North Shore and New York City in 1922, during the Jazz Age, a time of prosperity – for the glamorous rich at least. There have already been five Hollywood films and a sixth is on its way with Leonard DiCaprio. The Elevator Repair Service, an American experimental theatre group, brings their lavishly praised production to London. The whole novel – word for word, all 49,000 of them, including all the he saids/she saids – is read aloud. The performance starts at 2.30 and ends at 10.40. There are two 15 minute intervals and one dinner interval of 90 minutes.
Director John Collins, eschewing all period glamour, sets the action entirely in the drabbest of drab offices. One of the workers’ computer crashes and he picks up the novel and starts reading. Soon he becomes the narrator, Nick Carraway, who is simultaneously fascinated and disgusted by Gatsby, the millionaire bootlegger. His colleagues gradually get drawn in and start to act the other characters. Audiences, who have been brought up by the RSC to watch three of Shakespeare’s history plays in one day, may find Gatz a doddle; but they will also find the production is often tedious. Clever though it is, it is a gimmick that only occasionally works. The performance, despite Scott Shepherd’s masterly reading feat, never convinces you that you are listening to the greatest American novel of the 20th century.