F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that there are no second acts in American lives, but this one comes with lengthy second, third and fourth acts into the bargain: including intervals and a longer meal break, it clocks in at eight and a quarter hours. This is because New York’s Elevator Repair Service company (now appearing, appropriately, as part of LIFT, the London International Festival of Theatre) have adapted Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby by cutting not a single word of it, not even the likes of “he said”.
    
Gatz arrives from New York laden with acclaim, and consequently with high expectations. Whether it meets them or not is a moot point. Reviewing the same company’s (slightly shorter) version of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in 2010’s Edinburgh Festival, I observed that “a book unfolds at a rate negotiated between author and reader; reading a novel at one sitting is the exception rather than the rule.” This is not a reproduction, nor an analogue, of the reading experience; it is a second- or even third-degree portrayal of it. An office worker arrives in his dingy, early-1990s workplace (manual typewriter, computer with CRT monitor, brick-sized cellphone) and, unable to get his PC working, finds a copy of the novel stashed in his Rolodex. He begins to read aloud, and gradually his dozen co-workers start enacting the story. (It is half an hour before another person utters an audible word.) Or, alternatively, we see him using figures familiar to him to people his inner envisioning of it. Or something. And why early ’90s? Does it correspond to the semi-recent-past setting of the novel? Maybe. Who knows?
    
Scott Shepherd, as protagonist Nick, begins his reading in a flat, uninterested voice. I can’t say I noticed the transition into more absorbed tones, partly because they never get that much more absorbed anyway; similarly with the rest of the cast moving from a mild deadpan mockery to more serious portrayals. The underlying style throughout is that kind of semi-detached “post-acting” used by a number of NY companies.
    
The aim, as far as I can see, is to seduce us into the deeper experience little by little via amusement and curiosity. Its success or otherwise is a matter of personal negotiation. For myself, I’m aware that a durational work like this entails different rhythms and pacing (and believe me, these eight hours are chicken-feed compared, for instance, to the 24 or so of Neil Oram’s The Warp), but I don’t think that means that you can afford to draw the viewer in more slowly. On the contrary, you need to get them to commit as early and as fully as possible to buying, so to speak, the full set of dramatic encyclopaedias. I didn’t; others did; you might. Who, once again, knows?

Written for the Financial Times.