Last week I went to New York to see a show called Gatz by Elevator Repair Service.  Elevator Repair Service are one of the leading lights of the New York experimental theatre scene: they’ve been going for about 20 years and put on some truly extraordinary work.

They are particularly known for their often conceptual adaptations of great American classics and were most recently seen at the Edinburgh Festival this year with ‘The Sun Also Rises’, which was an adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel.  And Gatz is ‘The Great Gatsby’.  It’s an eight hour show, that involves the central character, Nick Carraway, reading the book of The Great Gatsby from start to finish word for word.  Not thrilling theatrical entertainment you might think but you’d be very wrong.

It starts with someone walking into their office where they find a copy of the novel next to a rolodex, open it and start reading it.  The characters from the world of the office then start to transition into the characters from the Great Gatsby, with Carraway at the centre of the action.  It’s an amazing transition and the piece has some great concepts: overall its epic durational, and absolutely extraordinary, holding the audience in concentration for 8 hours.

What was really interesting about it, which I’d never really picked up on – I mean, I knew the Great Gatsby, read it when I was younger, certainly I’d seen the film with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow – but what you get from the book is what an extraordinary writer F. Scott Fitzgerald was – the eloquence of the prose, it’s so well crafted and so complex and the production is well-crafted and layered, and it’s also a very interesting deconstruction of the American dream.  The story, which is about the rise of essentially the nouveau riche in the 20s in America, coming up with new ways of making money that are seen as distasteful, that are frowned upon by the more traditional elite.  Jay Gatsby represents that and the parallels between the rise of new money then and new money now, seeing the show as a commentary on America now, with all that’s happened with the US’s role at the centre of a banking crisis that was built on forgery and fakery, was very telling.  So it was a very interesting time to revisit the text.

Gatz is an extraordinary piece of event theatre and we’d love to bring it to audiences in London in 2012.