Mirror on the world

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Fest Magazine.

At London’s Southwark Playhouse, a man stands alone on the stage. In a nod to austerity, there is no other actor to take on the second role in this two-hander; instead, the play recruits its audience to read words projected onto a screen. It is a simple move, but one that speaks of collaborative protest in the face of injustice.

This was just one scene of many from last year’s Theatre Uncut. Harnessing the widespread anger sparked by the government’s Spending Review, this nationwide project hit back at slashes to public spending with a series of short plays that were made freely available for anyone to perform, from professional theatre companies to local am-dram societies, inciting over 800 participants to take action. The spirit was one of united protest, something that has been repeatedly felt in global politics over the last 12 months. It is this spirit that now brings Theatre Uncut back to the front line.

“This year we spoke a lot about whether or not it needed to happen,” says co-artistic director Emma Callander, who has taken the reins from founder Hannah Price for the 2012 season. During these discussions, the creative team found that the appetite for this political brand of collaborative theatre, so evident last year, is far from sated. “We felt that it did need to happen, because there were lots of issues which people still needed to debate and potentially take action on.”

The subjects tackled in this year’s plays read like a catalogue of discontent: the Eurozone crisis, mass civil unrest, the Occupy movement, the sorry state of global capitalism. From its initial platform as a theatrical movement speaking out against the coalition government’s spending cuts, Theatre Uncut has widened into a forum for political debate on myriad issues from around the world.

“It was important for us to put the UK’s situation into an international frame,” Callander explains. Drawing on a politically and economically tumultuous year for much of the globe, the plays from writers including Neil LaBute, Mohammad Al Attar and Lena Kitsopoulou place the UK’s unique problems within the context of a world screaming for change. Callander hopes the global perspectives will create “an exchange of ideas and issues that we need to face from country to country through a theatrical form.”

Going global has, however, had its difficulties. While audiences of the 2011 plays were “quite savvy” about the political and social issues being dissected, conveying national problems to an international audience presents a much greater challenge, but one that Callander describes as “wonderful.”

Such challenges are partly the reason for presenting a selection of the 2012 plays at the Traverse this summer, which will provide a brief glimpse of the work ahead of the full run in the autumn. Reversing last year’s performance schedule, the Fringe is something of a test run for the new pieces, as well as a springboard to reach out to potential collaborators. As Callander points out, there are few better places than Edinburgh to reach an international audience.

In addition to the previews, each Monday morning programme will include quick-fire pieces from emerging writers Stef Smith and Kieran Hurley, hurriedly written in response to whatever is hitting the headlines that week. Sweeping aside the suggestion that the form might have inherent limitations, Callander is infectiously enthusiastic about the possibilities of rapid response theatre. “It’s an immediate, live debate about something that’s happening right there and then.”

Callander sees this form of theatre as a catalyst for discussion, a “totally different beast” to work developed over a longer period. “I don’t even see time as a limitation,” she insists. “The whole point of this kind of theatre is that it’s rough, it’s vital.” To nurture such discussions, Theatre Uncut will be holding post-show talks after each performance, asking that audiences share their thoughts about the plays and engage in debate with the theatremakers.

Despite its origins and the very political nature of the material it explores, Callander is uncomfortable with Theatre Uncut being pigeonholed as political theatre. “All theatre,” she argues, “is in some way political, because everything is political.” But what she does recognise is drama’s ability to effect change, on individuals as much as policy-makers. “It’s where I go to learn how to live better,” she says of the theatre. “It’s the way that I best understand the world, so I hope that I can facilitate that for other people.”

Above all, she stresses, Theatre Uncut hopes to “encourage debate and galvanise action”. And can we expect this debate to continue? Callander’s answer is firm and concise. “As long as we feel the need is there, we’ll present it.”

Subsidy, Patronage & Sponsorship

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

“It’s been completely miserable.” Such was playwright David Edgar’s wry assessment of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s three day conference on the state of funding for theatre and performance, examining everything from Arts Council subsidy to the ubiquitous rise of crowd-funding. It is not, on the face of it, a rosy picture. Even in the so-called “golden years” of state subsidy during the New Labour era, substantial investment did not yield new audiences – a predicament that is unlikely to improve now that budgets are being brutally slashed – while the alternatives of sponsorship and philanthropy are attended by a whole plethora of ethical concerns.

There is, however, cause for discussion, and perhaps even a faint glimmer of optimism. To borrow a hackneyed proverb, necessity is the mother of invention; if nothing else, the current crisis is proving to be a stimulating catalyst for new and creative ways of thinking. WhatSubsidy, Patronage & Sponsorship has made clear, at least across the sessions on the day I attended, is a need for new, non-monetary ways of thinking about the value of theatre, a need to ask the awkward questions, a need to engage with and question the inter-linked nature of Arts Council policy and artistic trends, and a need to break through the false binaries that hamper theatre in this country.

Many discussions inevitably revolved around money, or more often than not lack of it. Yet there was also an undercurrent of resistance, a tug away from the imposition of economic measures on an art form that is essentially ephemeral and as such proves more robust against the efforts of commodification than, for instance, the visual arts. As one attendee pointed out during the concluding plenary, the theatre community needs to refocus its efforts on engaging people to value theatre, and not just attempting to persuade governments of its price tag.

Shifting away from the present gloom, the 1970s provided a compelling historical hook on which to hang the difficulties faced at this current juncture. This was a decade which similarly experienced financial crisis, mass unemployment and a Royal Jubilee, but one in which theatrical culture was characterised by a burgeoning alternative movement made up of the likes of Inter-Action, whose founder and former director were among the day’s speakers.

As well as playing with performative experiments in living, this generation of artists questioned the ways in which theatre is assigned value, from the eschewing of box office culture by the Almost Free Theatre to theatremakers’ reminiscences of planning tours around signing on for the dole, delicately captured in Susan Croft’s Unfinished Histories project. One thing that these artists spoke about strikingly in Croft’s recordings was their passionate work ethic – a work ethic outside of and not recognised by the dominant structures of capitalism.

This prompted unspoken questions about the valuing of artists today, a tender and topical subject. Bitter disputes continue to circle the widespread use of unpaid performers by projects such as You Me Bum Bum Train, disputes that often raise valid and urgent questions, but that in their admirable mission to defend the right of artists to be paid often ignore the equal right of artists to refuse payment. If the only artistic endeavours we allow are those that reimburse their participants, not only are we eliminating certain passionate but penniless pockets of innovation; we also rob artists of the option to reject monetary exchanges and pursue a definition of art that sits firmly outside of the capitalist figuring of labour.

This idea of being outside, of being alternative, is one that continued to resurface throughout the conference. But while creeping around the edges of otherwise underexplored issues and ideas represents one of theatre’s great strengths, there was also a warning against accepting marginality. Robert Hewison’s data-chewing key note speech aired some bleak if perhaps unsurprising figures, revealing that more than 60% of the adult population in this country does not engage at all with theatre and performance. While audience sizes should not necessarily be the driving motivation of artists – creativity needs, as Peter Brook would argue, a few empty seats – Hewison’s point was that the theatre community must confront the uncomfortable questions that will be asked of it if it is to formulate answers.

One proposed answer, as already touched upon, is to engage directly with that 60%. Hewison’s interrogation of survey evidence also revealed that while the typical theatregoer profile ticks many of the expected boxes – well educated, white, middle-class – it is in fact an elusive concept of identity that drives engagement with theatre and performance more than any demographic factor. For people who regularly attend the theatre, that theatre both speaks to them and says something about them. Such a component of identity cannot be easily engendered by marketing campaigns or ticket price initiatives; it was argued that instead social interaction could be the key to producing this engagement.

London Bubble Theatre Company’s Jonathan Petherbridge put it nicely when he analogised the theatre as a restaurant. For all that the chefs might proclaim the deliciousness of their food, it will always seem not to be to some people’s taste, but once you invite people to cook, their engagement rockets. This engagement need not necessarily be with the entire creative process, but it was put forward by several different voices at the conference that theatre as an art form needs to be more sociable and to reach out to new audiences, whether this involves working directly with local communities or simply taking the work where it can be seen.

The conference also trudged back over well covered ground in the very British division between “new writing” and “new work” that continues to dominate current conversations and was in this context seen as a division that is holding back progress – a “poisonous binary”, as David Edgar emphatically put it. There was even an attempt during the final open discussion to move away from these familiar debates, with the playwrights on the panel themselves expressing exasperation with this seemingly evergreen topic.

This binary, however, is one that has been perpetuated by an odd, mutually influencing relationship between Arts Council policy and the dominant creative output of this country’s theatre, as explained by Edgar in referring to the split that occurred between text and performance based work during the new writing heyday of the 1990s. Now we have too many writers and a skewed perception of authorship, neither of which is a small problem and both of which contribute to the wider problems faced by theatre today.

So what, if anything, can we conclude? It was generally agreed that subsidy is still important, but playwright David Eldridge hit the heart of the issue succinctly when he said that “artists need to be willing to bite the hand that feeds them in a heartbeat” – whether that be the hand of the Arts Council, private philanthropy or corporate sponsorship.

There was also a feeling that to move forward we have to smash down barriers; barriers between text-based and performance-based work, between the falsely oppositional concepts of the avant-garde and the popular, between artists and audiences. And whatever we might need to smash to get there, we need to find ways to make sure that those artists are still there, occupying the liminal spaces, feeling at the edges of society, finding room in which to play.

 

Northernmost Stage

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

There is professional fervour for the Edinburgh Fringe, as an international platform on which to present new work, and then there is pure, unfettered love for the festival in all its chaos. Erica Whyman, the artistic director at the helm of Northern Stage’s ambitious Fringe programme at St Stephen’s this year, falls firmly into the latter camp.

“I just love the energy of it,” she tells me over a snatched lunchtime phone call. Unsurprisingly, Whyman – who has also just been announced as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first deputy artistic director – is a very busy woman at the moment. Northern Stage’s pilot project at St Stephen’s is due to take sixteen separate productions up to Edinburgh, where the venue is providing accommodation for all performers involved, not to mention converting the atmospheric church into a performance space. It is a massive undertaking.

“If you’re going to arrive in Edinburgh, you need to arrive with a bit of a bang,” says Whyman by way of explanation. Her initial intention was to test this collaborative model with just three productions, but the project rapidly snowballed into a full season of work over the month of the festival. The idea was born out of Whyman’s love for Edinburgh, an existing relationship with St Stephen’s, and the feeling that artists in the North needed an affordable platform to present their work to Edinburgh’s international audience.

There was also a funding incentive. “In 2011, when we were applying for Arts Council funding for Northern Stage, I was conscious that it was important to try and demonstrate a growing relationship across the region,” Whyman explains. “It struck us that we could kill two birds with one stone. We thought that there was a lot of interesting contemporary work coming out of the North and that if we bundled that together into one venue we could have a really striking programme.”

The various pieces compiled by Whyman for the festival appear, at least at first glance, to have little in common other than geographical location. They range from RashDash’s bold cabaret transformation of Cinderella to the gentle, biscuit-fuelled audience participation of Faye Draper’s Tea is an Evening Meal. Asked about the programming, which she characterises as one of the easiest components of the whole process, Whyman admits that she did not grasp at any unifying thread or theme.

“It wasn’t terribly …” Whyman trails off, chewing over her words, before continuing: “I was going to say conscious, but that’s not quite true. We didn’t set out to find a particular kind of work.” One characteristic that the productions do share, however, is a direct relationship with their audiences, which Whyman explains was intentional. She hopes that these choices will have the power to surprise theatregoers and to subvert any clichés that exist about Northern theatre, breaking away from the stereotype of gritty kitchen-sink realism to embrace more contemporary, internationally minded work. Instead of being concerned exclusively with the region they originate from, many of the works, like Third Angel’s What I Heard About the World, exhibit “an outward-looking curiosity”.

If the programming has been relatively straightforward, the logistical challenges of transporting sixteen productions to the Fringe are proving more demanding. Northern Stage has booked a total of 59 bedrooms for its artists across the festival and is creating two performance spaces and a café within the environs of St Stephen’s – and that’s without even factoring in the coordination of marketing and press, the organisation and training of volunteers, the feat of teching sixteen separate shows. As Whyman laughs grimly, “there are a lot of spreadsheets”.

This nightmare of organisation responds, however, to what Whyman feels is a deep need within the region. Ultimately, this is a venture driven by artists. “We did a lot of listening and asking artists what made Edinburgh valuable for them,” Whyman tells me. The response was overwhelming in its enthusiasm for the artistic opportunities offered by the festival, but the associated costs, particularly of accommodation, emerged as a major barrier, even for more established companies. To lower this barrier, Northern Stage is taking on many of those costs through a collective, collaborative approach. In Whyman’s words, “this model has just shifted the balance”, spreading the load to make the festival more affordable.

Is this an approach that other venues and artists might adopt in order to take work to Edinburgh? Whyman’s answer is careful. “It’s up to every project and every region to work out what’s best for their artists,” she says, acknowledging that this is not a realistic or desirable model for everyone. She goes on to explain that “there’s a kind of logic” to the project that Northern Stage has mounted: “In the case of the North, we happen to be a venue that already presents, develops and co-produces a great deal on a small scale, which isn’t true of everybody.” Conversations sparked by the St Stephen’s season have, however, revealed an interest in other parts of the UK, raising the possibility that we may see more regional or venue-based programming at Edinburgh in future years.

Such conversations tap into a growing obsession with collaboration, a preoccupation born from the difficulties imposed by recent and forthcoming cuts to Arts Council funding. Not only is Northern Stage participating in its own collaborative activity by bringing together artists from across the North at St Stephen’s; the theatre will also be harnessing these discussions during the festival at Stronger Together, a day of debate and provocations about collaboration in the arts. Following last year’s symposium at Northern Stage’s Newcastle home, Edinburgh would appear to be the perfect forum in which to throw these discussions even wider.

This year’s conversation, I am told, will differ from 2011 in more than just location. “Unlike last year, when we were all still reeling from the funding decisions, good or bad, this year it feels like there’s a need to talk differently about collaboration and to make sure that we are in charge of it in this sector,” says Whyman. Collaboration has become such a ubiquitous buzz word in the arts that it is vital for platforms such as this to take a step back and interrogate it. “We’re posing the question that day: can collaboration change the game, and if so what game do we want it to change?”

The day will feature speakers such as David Jubb, Vicky Featherstone, Chris Thorpe and Lucy Ellinson, as well as a case study from Globe to Globe organiser Tom Bird, offering an international lens on what collaboration can mean on a large scale. The format partly borrows from the Open Space Technology that has become synonymous with Devoted & Disgruntled, allowing attendees to put forward topics for discussion and weave freely in and out of different conversations.

Whyman explains that the day is less about the collaboration that Northern Stage has forged and more about how all artists can collaborate better – as well as when they should avoid collaboration altogether. One intriguing contribution is to come from Andy Field, who will discuss the experiences of Forest Fringe since losing their Edinburgh venue, exploring “the idea that you might move the conversation forward more effectively by resisting and by not necessarily doing what people expect you to do”. It is a provocative challenge to the popular feeling that collaboration is always positive.

Doing the unexpected and confronting new challenges brings us back to Northern Stage’s own ambitious model of collaboration. Only through execution will it be made clear whether such a model can work, but this is undoubtedly a bold move from Northern Stage and one that could mark a shift in the way in which artists approach Edinburgh in future years. Vitally, Whyman’s approach to collaboration is one that is not only asking “how can we do it better?” but also “how can we resist if necessary?”

Hotel Medea

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Exeunt.

Not long into our interview, Jorge Lopes Ramos, co-creator of ambitious overnight theatre experience Hotel Medea, is at pains to stress the collaborative aspect of the durational piece he has helped to coordinate. “This is not my work,” he says firmly, “but ours”. He is referring specifically to his fellow director Persis-Jade Maravala, who is unable to join our chat, but he might as well also be speaking more widely about everyone involved in each performance, right down to the last audience member. Because if one thing is vital to this extraordinary night of theatre, it is the collaboration of its audience.

It was not initially clear, however, whether such an audience would even exist. “This is not – no pun intended – an overnight success,” Ramos insists. Despite emerging from its premiere at Edinburgh as a much discussed hit, it took a lengthy development process to translate Hotel Medea from a bold embryonic idea to a finished six-hour show. At first, Ramos explains, it met with a lot of scepticism and reluctance from industry programmers, mainly because of the sheer impractical audacity of staging a production between midnight and dawn. As a result, Hotel Medea became a self-proclaimed “act of resistance”, a stubborn placing of trust in the belief that audience members would want to take this theatrical endurance test.

“If you ask anyone who has seen the show, the fact that it’s six hours long never crosses their mind,” Ramos claims in response to my suggestion that keeping audiences engaged during the night must be a struggle. The length certainly seems not to have put off the many theatregoers who have happily jumped into their pyjamas for a night at Hotel Medea during its numerous runs, the latest of which takes place at the South Bank Centre this summer. In the minds of its creators, Ramos tells me, the experience is one connected with the unique quality of night time rather than with the number of hours it lasts. “Whether it’s four or six or eight hours long makes very little difference, because the engagement is with midnight and daybreak, so however long that is, you’re moving towards dawn.” It creates, as much theatre does, a fluid relationship with time.

Ramos does admit, however, that a fair amount of thought has had to go into sustaining the energy of audience members throughout the performance. “The whole dramaturgy of the event, which we call dramaturgy of participation, is centred on how a person reacts or engages with events at every time of the night,” he explains. Through a rigorous process of audience research, Hotel Medea is meticulously crafted to keep its audience actively and passively engaged at the right moments, judging when to recruit them in role play and when to give them a breather. Even more ingeniously, this structure of participation and rest has been carefully woven into the narrative of the myth that is being told.

So why this myth? Before answering my question, Ramos is quick to emphasise that this is not an adaptation of Euripides’ text – “we’re dealing with a myth, not a version of a myth”. Of all the Greek myths handed down to us, the tale of Medea’s betrayal and bloody revenge courts possibly the most enduring fascination, becoming the subject of recurring artistic interpretations. Ramos thinks that it’s all to do with the shock factor. “In other Greek myths, because of the time context, you almost need to redesign the taboo for today. With Medea you don’t; it’s still as fresh and as full of impact.”

But impact is not the only reason for selecting this particular myth. It also just so happens that all of Medea’s revenge against philandering Jason is wreaked overnight, rendering it the perfect story to tell in this nocturnal environment. As Ramos goes on to elaborate, the inexorable approach of the dawn holds equal significance for their presentation of the myth. “The arrival of the sun is symbolic,” he says. “The sun god is Medea’s grandfather, who has given Medea’s father the golden fleece as a birth present, which is what attracts Jason to invade Medea’s land in the first place.”

Hotel Medea’s attention-grabbing staging might have the slight whiff of a gimmick, but speaking to Ramos, I sense that these elements ultimately serve the show they are trying to create rather than the other way round. The same goes for the production’s use of audience participation. Immersive and interactive theatre are undeniably in vogue at present, which can hardly be doing Hotel Medea any harm, but it is a fashion that Ramos has little patience for. “It’s inevitable that you get branded and categorised with companies whose work people find, in a superficial way, similar to what you do,” he concedes, before frankly stating that he does not enjoy much of the work that typically falls into this camp.

“The point of immersivity for us was as a direct answer to the question of how we look after an audience overnight,” Ramos continues, seeing their interpretation of immersive theatre as intimately tied up with the unique demands of the piece they have created. “I dislike work that brands itself immersive,” he says, “because it tends to rely on that category to have an impact and a relevance.” Instead, Ramos and Maravala are interested above all in theatre that puts the individual experience of the audience member at its centre.

“I just like to be looked after,” Ramos says simply. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an opera, a musical, a highly participatory event – I just want to know that someone actually thought about me.” He and Maravala have applied this mantra to Hotel Medea, with the aim of putting their audience at ease and considering the individual experience of each theatregoer. This is partly achieved through the rather novel idea of an “audience training camp”, where tentative audience members are supportively put through their participatory paces before the show proper, the theory being that they then approach the performance with a more relaxed attitude.

But even without this, the very format of the show immediately nurtures a different relationship between performers and audience. Before arriving at the venue, theatregoers have made the conscious decision to lose a night’s sleep, to go on an overnight journey with a group of strangers. As Ramos puts it, “we already have an implied contract of trust”. This implicit contract is essentially what has driven the development of the show, prompting ways to first of all attract that audience and then to encourage those theatregoers into participation.

It seems to be working. Not only has Hotel Medea found its audience, it has taken its hand and led it through the early hours, allowing it to claim some ownership over the resulting creation. As Ramos makes clear, this new engagement with the audience is the desired culmination of six years of collaboration and hard work and of six sleepless hours. The ultimate hope is that, in Ramos’ words, “we are able to go quite far together”.

Gatz, Noel Coward Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

A small disclaimer: the performance I’m writing about was technically a preview, though Elevator Repair Service have in fact been performing this show since 2004. This also seems a slightly superfluous disclosure considering that I don’t expect what follows to be a “proper” review in any conventional sense. If either of those two statements displease you, probably best to stop reading now …

As I probably don’t need to tell you, the headline-grabbing aspect of Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, currently visiting the West End as part of LIFT 2012, is its length. A performance in which every last word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is read aloud, this sort of anti-adaptation is eight hours long. Eight hours.

Except that’s already a slight lie. Intervals factored in – including a fairly generous dinner break – this is actually more like six hours of stage time in total. And in fact, astoundingly, the length is probably one of the less extraordinary things about Gatz. People arrive prepped for an act of endurance; the group next to me seemed to have packed an entire picnic and, to my slight envy, a flask of tea. Twitter reveals more of the same, some theatregoers even arming themselves with pillows. But, with the minimal aid of caffeine top-ups, this is far less of a marathon than it appears. More of a pleasurable and mildly tiring fun run, perhaps.

The concept is brilliantly simple. A bored office worker, the staggeringly excellent Scott Shepherd (more on him later), arriving at work to find his computer on the blink, stumbles across a copy of The Great Gatsby on his desk. He begins to read, and continues to do so for the following eight (minus intervals) hours. I say read, but in a mind-boggling feat of memory, Shepherd knows the whole thing off by heart, *spoiler alert* as he stunningly proves during the final 45-minute sequence delivered entirely without the prop of the book. *end spoiler alert* Although I’d happily be lulled by Shepherd’s strangely hypnotic voice alone, he is also joined one by one by other figures in the office, who gradually take on roles within the novel.

And that, essentially, is it. Except it’s also so much more. Elevator Repair Service’s staging seems like a good place to start. The entire thing takes place in a typically stale and soulless office, naturalistically rendered down to each last biro. My immediate assumption, though this isn’t confirmed by any period-specific references, is that we’re in the late eighties or early nineties, based mainly on the appearance of Shepherd’s faulty computer. I can’t help wondering if this vague, recent-ish setting has a calculated resonance with Fitzgerald’s novel; though we’re far from the steel and glass of Wall Street, the implied era is that of the sort of greed and excess so grotesquely satirised by Caryl Churchill in Serious Money, a world not dissimilar from the pre-Crash extravagance displayed at Gatsby’s parties. The expensive calm before the storm.

Beyond the usual office paraphernalia, the only thing out of the ordinary in Louisa Thompson’s set is an onstage sound deck, which later becomes key to the subtle evocation of the world of Fitzgerald’s novel. Visually, this is the antithesis of Baz Luhrman’s forthcoming film, the trailer for which is all glitter and no grit. In the decidedly drab surroundings of Elevator Repair Service’s production, the responsibility for the glitter lays entirely with the text, which dazzles all by itself. I suspect that I was in the majority among the audience in having already read the novel, albeit several years ago, but even for those familiar with the book this is something of a journey of discovery.

The beauty of this unconventional method of staging a novel is that it becomes so much more about the literary work at its centre than any traditional adaptation ever is. Fitzgerald’s prose is both protagonist and creator; everything is born from the words. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but for such a celebrated classic The Great Gatsby has a remarkably slight plot. Condensed right down, it is essentially the classic spiky love triangle (or love square, perhaps, if we’re including Myrtle). Illicit romance, the return of an old flame, betrayal and jealousy – nothing ground-breaking. What’s more, if you’re purely focusing on events, Nick barely features, lingering perpetually on the sidelines.

All of which is exactly why Gatz works so brilliantly. There is of course so much more to Fitzgerald’s novel than a hackneyed love story and so much more to its narrator, who is revealed in the prose as a central character in his own right. In a normal adaptation much of this is lost, whereas Elevator Repair Service have not only preserved this but actually enhanced it. As Jay McInerney pointed out recently in the Observer, “Fitzgerald’s prose somehow elevates a lurid and underdeveloped narrative to the level of myth”. In reinventing the act of reading on stage, I would go as far as to suggest that Gatz elevates this (no pun intended) a level further.

The literary junkie’s ultimate high, the only way to really, accurately describe Gatz is as reading intensified. It’s that fevered devouring of a novel without all the cheating, not allowing you to skim through sections that seem unnecessary to the story, and in the process revealing those bits as absolutely necessary. Such a treatment obviously wouldn’t work for every book, but for The Great Gatsby it’s perfect, polishing every last buried gem in Fitzgerald’s language and lending his prose a heightened poetry through Shepherd’s mesmerising tones.

We also glimpse before our eyes that slipping away of the real world as the world of the book takes its grip. Piece by piece the office morphs into the glamorous parties of the twenties; hedonism is casually evoked by a fistful of papers tossed in the air, while the sounds of jazz gradually infect the stage. I was beguiled by the way in which reality and fiction are ever fluid, meshing with one another and then suddenly jarring, until by the end, *spoiler claxon* as Shepherd lays down his book, it is no longer clear which is which. In the way that only a great novel can, Fitzgerald’s world has engulfed all around it.

And as I mentioned already, we are treated to many little discoveries along the way. It may have simply been that at the age of sixteen, when I first read the novel, I was spectacularly unobservant, but this presentation of the text revealed to me several new facets of Fitzgerald’s tale. This time around, perhaps influenced by the current state of the world, the novel’s attitude to capitalism seems even more scathing. For many of the characters, love and money are almost synonymous – the attraction of Daisy’s voice is that it rings with wealth. Elevator Repair Service’s concept underlines this obsession by placing it within the context of a space where making money is the main objective, generating only monotonous drudgery. Against this dull office setting, the American Dream is just that – dreamlike, insubstantial, and incompatible with the drabness of reality.

With a jolted remembrance of Jean Baudrillard’s “hyperreal”, it suddenly seemed to me while watching that even in 1925 The Great Gatsby was oddly anticipating postmodernism, whispering of the substitution of the real with signs of the real. Nick describes how his mysterious friend experiences “the unreality of reality”; to Daisy, Gatsby – already concealed behind a false identity – resembles an advertisement; the all-seeing, bespectacled eyes of the same advertisement become an oddly sinister capitalist substitute for God; the treasured photograph of Gatsby’s lavish mansion is more real to his father than the house itself. The addition of another few layers of simulacra in the form of performance only serves to enhance this.

Which brings me back to the performance itself. Much of what I’ve written so far makes it sound as though Gatz is purely concerned with literature, but Elevator Repair Service also incisively interrogate the workings of theatre. The conventions of representation get a comical prod, as what we are offered visually often directly contradicts with what we are being told. Jim Fletcher is a particularly unlikely Gatsby in his mismatched pink suit, and there is a beautiful moment when Shepherd reads the line about girls rubbing champagne in his hair and pauses to look incredulously at the balding figure opposite him.

There is much more to Gatz than can be contained in one blog post without stretching to ridiculous lengths, but Shepherd deserves a special mention before I reluctantly leave the experience behind me. His performance would be extraordinary for the memorising of the text alone, but this is much, much more than an impressive act of recall. It’s difficult for me to pin down quite why he makes such a compelling presence, but I think the closest I can get to articulating it is that he lives the book. When he reads those final, gorgeous sentences, we don’t quite want to leave him and the story he has told behind.

Tipped out onto the pavement after several hours in the novel’s company, I felt dazed and dazzled, slowly emerging from the deep submersion of Elevator Repair Service’s storytelling, blinking against the glare of the outside world. As I finally finish writing about it almost three weeks later, it still hasn’t fully relinquished its grip on me. And that pretty much says it all.