Mesmerising Take On Gatsby

by Jason Blake

The actor Scott Shepherd, like everyone else in this meticulous, mesmerising production from New York’s Elevator Repair Service, takes to the stage as an employee of a no-name company in a crummy downtown office.

He enters, sucking on a coffee. He flops into his chair, turns on his computer and . . . nothing. He pokes the switch, counts silently to 10. Nothing. He pokes it again. Nothing. Expressing no great irritation, he reaches for a dog-eared paperback and, in soft deadpan voice, begins reading aloud.

By the time he intones the immortal last lines of that novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, we have been listening to Shepherd for the better part of seven hours. For the final half hour at least, he has dispensed with the pretence of reading. He now addresses us directly, not as an anonymous desk jockey, but as the quintessential Jazz Age outsider Nick Carraway, witness to a spectacular rise and fall.

Over the course of the performance, Nick’s bored co-workers have morphed into the rest of Fitzgerald’s characters: a girl who reads golf magazines in her downtime has become Jordan Baker; a pretty secretary is now Daisy and the testy building super her aristocratic thug of a husband, Tom. The boss, Jim, assumes the role of the ultimate self-made man, Gatsby.

Director John Collins and cast echo Fitzgerald’s elegant descriptions in a series of deft and funny visual puns, and with expertly triggered sound and light support deployed from side of stage, the office (a striking piece of dirty realism by Louisa Thompson) stands variously for a Manhattan love nest, the ash fields of the outer boroughs, and Gatsby’s fabulous mansion.

Shepherd’s performance is remarkable for its understated poise and its unfailing rhythm. His left foot unobtrusively taps like a jazz soloist’s. Jim Fletcher’s Gatz/Gatsby, still and watchful, is utterly compelling, able to express enormous feeling in a minute adjustment of that monumental head of his.

Metabolic ups and downs will colour the individual experience of the piece to some extent, but no one who sticks it to the end will be disappointed. It mightn’t be “theatre” for many, but Gatz leaves you with a profound sense of being connected to theatre’s tap root in the oral tradition.

View the original article on the Sydney Morning Herald website here .