The Great Gatsby

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I was delighted and daunted in equal measure when I was asked to direct Blackeyed Theatre’s production of The Great Gatsby. Over the past decade the company has built up a national reputation for producing innovative, exciting and challenging theatre, often using actor-musicians to tell it’s stories with integrity and passion and the Great Gatsby, rooted as it is in the musicality of America's 'Jazz Age’, felt like a great fit with the company’s ethos. I’d studied the novel at school and it had left me with a lasting admiration for Fitzgerald’s work. I love the cool, sexy, almost dream like quality it has. It’s strange, cynical and sophisticated, full of poetry, memorable throw-away phrases and populated by completely unforgettable characters. There is always a certain pressure in taking on a novel that everyone seems to know and love but I knew that I had to do it and I can’t wait for rehearsals to start!

How faithful is the stage production to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original 

novel?

The writer Stephen Sharkey has delivered a fantastic theatrical adaptation that stays very faithful to Fitzgerald’s original novel. With F. Scott Fitzgerald’s exquisite writing, where not a word seems to be wasted, it serves no purpose to try and invent things that were never there or reinterpret them for a modern setting. Instead the genius is in choosing which fine dishes to serve from a banquet of possibilities and to that end, Sharkey has shaped and distilled the work into a muscular, narrative-driven text that stays very true to the rhythm, feeling, sensuality and ebb and flow of the novel. 

We’ve added into the mix music and songs from the period, movement, dance and projection and allowed ourselves the freedom to serve the material theatrically with moments of heightened realism and sensuality. We’ve set the play firmly in the summer of 1923 reflected in Jenny Little’s gorgeous costumes and chosen music that would have been current or contemporaneous to the period, lovingly arranged for the production by musical director Ellie Verkerk. The whole creative team has approached this production from the beginning with what I hope is a marriage of imagination and integrity in order to bring Gatsby and the America of the 20’s roaring into life. I very much hope that fans of the novel will be pleased with what we’ve done and those that have never read it will want to after seeing the show!

What are the challenges with directing this adaptation? 

I was very keen to create a real ensemble piece of storytelling with the performers on stage acting, singing, playing the music live and creating the sights and sounds of the period right there in front of you as you watch. For me, part of the beauty and excitement of theatre is that it is a shared experience with the audience; it’s happening now, there, right in front of your eyes. As a medium, it’s the vital ingredient that makes going to the theatre a different experience from going to a film or watching TV. To that end we have cast a fantastically talented team of versatile performers who can all sing, move and who play numerous instruments between them. Part of the challenge for me is to work 

out what theatrical language we are going to use to tell the story and how we can integrate the music, songs and dances of the period into the action seamlessly and in a way that brings the period to life. Getting that balance right artistically will be a challenge! There are also practical challenges like working out who will be available to play and who for example will need to be rushing offstage to change costumes and i’m sure they'll be times when it will feel like directing traffic in Piccadilly Circus! 

The story also throws up the challenge of presenting many different changes of location. Scenes are set in different houses or hotels, in indoor spaces and at outdoor parties as well as on trains and in moving cars. Rather than trying to produce a set that literally reflected this, I made the decision, in collaboration with Victoria Spearing the set designer, to try and keep our space as open and uncluttered as possible. I'm a great believer that theatre is often most potent when it is most simple and I think one of my main tasks will be to try and find an economical but theatrically inventive language with which to move the action from one location to the next and to try and create a fluid yet dynamic environment aided by Charlotte McClelland’s lighting and Stephen Harrison’s projection design that helps shape the audiences’ imagination and captures the rhythms and changes of mood and pace in the script. 

And last but not least, there is always the challenge to have fun, to make the rehearsal room a space where the actors can really play, discover, create and ultimately take ownership of the material themselves.

From the moment that Adrian McDougall commissioned the script we set ourselves the task of interweaving the music and songs of the 20’s into the production and creating an ensemble of actor-musicians that could sing, play instruments and bring the period to life with style and flair. Jenny Little’s gorgeous costumes stay true to the period and we’ve chosen music that the characters may well have been heard at one of Gatsby’s parties. The novel is cool and sexy, almost stylised, with a mood of witty, vivacious self destruction. It follows one mans great dream and shows how things get swept along in it’s wake. Amongst other things, it’s a story about fantasy and the push and pull of reality, illusion and self delusion. Cool, cynical detachment is mixed with intrigue and the exciting sense of what is possible. We are in a world where strangers meet, compliment each other on their hair, kiss passionately and move on without comment, where huge parties can be enjoyed because they are so intimate. We’ve allowed ourselves the freedom to serve the material theatrically and have used projection, movement, music and song to create moments of heightened and sensual realism that amplifies a scene or situation and allows the audience to glimpse the passion that lies beneath the surface. 

How did you go about creating a vision for the set and costumes? 

I worked closely with Victoria Spearing the set designer, Charlotte McClellan the lighting designer and Jenny Little the costume designer to come up with a visual language for the production. I knew from the start that I wanted the costumes to be authentically period as I thought that would be a vital ingredient for grounding the piece firmly in the roaring 20’s and giving the audience that gorgeous and colourful visual flavour. Likewise I thought that it was important that the set had a sense of style and sophistication associated with the 1920’s and gave a nod to the Art Deco fashion current at the time

For storytelling reasons I also knew that I wanted to keep the space as open and uncluttered as possible, to allow the myriad changes of scene to be imaginative and fluid rather than literal. The challenge was to try and come up with a design that did this while still creating a plausible space for Gatsby’s mansion, the Valley of ashes as well as all the other locations that the play takes us to. Victoria’s solution is I think, elegant, flexible and economical giving the audience just enough visually to stimulate their imaginations without being too prescriptive. The Art Deco inspired set with black and white shining monochrome surfaces will I hope throw into sharp relief the colourful costumes and the addition of a Grand piano, lots of steps, carefully placed hanging lights and and sparingly chosen pieces of furniture, will I believe give the space a sense of grandeur without it becoming too cluttered. Torn strips of material on the back wall give us a canvas to project onto and Charlotte McClellan’s lighting along with Stephen Harrison’s video projections will I hope allow us to create a sense of space, scale and mood as well as helping solve that director’s nightmare of how to stage scenes in cars! 

What parallels can be drawn between the 1920s world of Gatsby and the apparent class divide today?

There is no doubt that money and wealth in the Great Gatsby are hugely important. Tom gives Daisy a set of pearls worth 350,000 dollars and weds her with 'more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before.” The penniless Gatsby doesn’t just need to have money he needs to convince Daisy that he has always had money. That he comes from the right class. Indeed he dedicates his life to that one aim. But when the moment comes, when his dream is tantalisingly within reach we see that his Rolls Royce, his Hydro-plane, his vast mansion, his beautiful shirts, his huge parties populated by celebrities and the great and the good, turn out to be very light when weighed against the charge that he is a common bootlegger associated with criminality. He is not from the right family, he doesn’t have the right background, he’s 'new money’, from West Egg, not East

As Tom scornfully and triumphantly tells Gatsby “I’ll be damned if you ever got within a mile of (Daisy) unless you brought the groceries to the back door”.

While I was thinking about the world that Gatsby inhabits and the uneasy relationship of morals to money and class to capitalism I opened a newspaper. The Independent 30th July 2015. “Prince George’s £18,000 birthday gift speaks volumes about Britain’s widening wealth gap” was the headline. A Wendy house in the back garden that cost more than many peoples annual wage. Olivia Acland wrote “It makes one wince to imagine adored George perched on his oak floor while other children are dumped in after school crèches by harried single parents struggling to earn enough to support them (and losing much of their wages on childcare while they're at it.) If George were to flog his new plaything on e-bay and do without his portable palace, then he’d be able buy wooden Wendy-houses for 225 under privileged children. Not only might that give a few kids the present of their lives, but it also might afford him some perspective which the rest of his family are quite clearly sorely lacking”. 

I think the question of what parallels there are between our society and Gatsby’s is probably best left for critics and social historians to ponder. The relationship between money... morals…class...we’re possibly not as far away from the Jazz age as we might think.

What can the audience expect from this production? 

Stephen Sharkey has shaped and distilled Fitzgerald’s novel into a muscular and narrative-driven portrait of the Jazz Age, full of cool, sexy, stiletto-sharp dialogue as cool as ice in a cocktail. Throw into the mix the work of our wonderful design team along with an ensemble of seven fabulously talented actors, who all sing, dance and play instruments, and I hope we have all the ingredients needed to give the audience a wonderful party and bring Fitzgerald’s Great American masterpiece roaring into life.