Theatre Review: The Sun Also Rises

by Joyce McMillan

Look across this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and you’ll find dozens of plays about the cult of sexual freedom, porn and pleasure that has seized our society since the 1960s. Ernest Hemingway, though, is the grandfather of them all, when it comes to writing about whether an endless quest for pleasure really brings happiness.

In 1926, when The Sun Also Rises became a best-seller, those freedoms were still confined to the wealthy elite whose adventures Hemingway describes, as he follows the alluring Brett Ashley — English aristocrat, and despair-ridden good-time-girl — from Paris to Pamplona, and the blood and thunder of the fiesta there.

Yet the questions he raised about his characters — their drinking, their despair, their casual or doomed relationships — have a tremendous contemporary resonance; and in the figure of his impotent and war-damaged narrator, Jake Barnes, he also embodies a deep sense of sterility, and of a future lost.

In bringing Hemingway’s story to the stage, the Elevator Repair Service of New York brilliantly avoid questions of updating or authenticity by setting the whole action in a generic bar-room of any place or period, and adopting a Brechtian rehearsal room technique that combines Jake’s narrative — performed with tremendous quiet clarity by Mike Iveson — with a series of roughly presented scenes from the story, starring a memorably brittle and charismatic Lucy Taylor as Brett.

At almost four hours, this version of Hemingway’s story is immensely long. It’s dazzlingly free and inventive, though, in its use of music spanning the whole century, and of sudden bursts of wild choreography, to create a profoundly intelligent piece of theatre that effortlessly bridges the decades since the 1920s.

If it sometimes seems to ramble a little, there’s never a moment that doesn’t seem rich with some aspect of the last 90 years of western culture; and with our long journey from jazz age to electronic age, in a quest for not only for freedom, but for authenticity, and for something we can call love.

View the original article on The Scotsman website here.