2010 Productions
Gatsby is Gorgeous
by Ruairi McCann
Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, has been adapted for the stage by SIS English teacher Ruairi McCann. The story takes place in New York during the roaring twenties...
En français
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Jean Cocteau, after reading the French translation, described Gatsby le magnifique as a “livre céleste: chose la plus rare du monde”. My own enthusiasm surpasses even his. The Great Gatsby contains the most beautiful writing in the English language – ever! And I don’t just mean a paragraph or two, but rather reams and reams of pages where Fitzgerald’s golden liquid prose drips off the paper, an “incomparable milk of wonder” in its own right.
In Fitzgerald’s eyes, 1920s America was going on “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history”. It’s not at all hard for us to imagine – all the conditions were in place: a perceived moral turpitude in the aftermath of the First World War; the brunt of prohibition and the associated contagion of organised crime; the popular imagination of the gangster as an object of fear and fascination, even sex symbolism!; economic boom-time and labour agitation; the growing excesses of the rich; huge leaps in technology (think shining motor cars, telephones and motion pictures); the spectacular epidemic of advertising and consumerism; mass immigration and efforts to limit it; the untying of social and sexual straitjackets, and, of course, a period of unprecedented freedom for women.
To this great, gaudy spree, I hope we remain faithful in our humble representation.
Adapting Gatsby to the stage (with all the particularities the SIS stage requires i.e. finding close to two hundred characters in a novel that has fewer than twenty – in this sense my play is very much of the Paddy Salmon School) is a delicate exercise. Nobody wants to bludgeon to death something they love. For this reason, our “Nick Carraways” (we have two!) practically drool Fitzgerald’s prose onto the stage floor at every given opportunity.
I have injected quite a bit of humour into the story, at times anachronistic, farcical, at times rather poignant and nostalgic. I hope the themes of the original novel remain at large in our play: an American Dream exposed as a corrupt failure – the “fresh green breast of the new world” as it appeared to those first explorers has been replaced by the “dark fields of the republic”; Romanticism transplanted to 1920s America, a Keatsian nightingale “broken up like glass” against the “hard malice” of capitalism and brutal materialism; but also the excitement and vigour of modern America, a foreshadowing of the American Dream gone global; money (old, new, erotic, creative, criminal, corruptive, contaminating) as the omnipresent backdrop; a very modern exploration of sexuality and gender where definitions are shifting and uncertain. There are potentially hundreds of ways to unravel meaning in this novel, and I hope our play (even with the prodigious anachronisms and farce that we so much love to include) touches on at least a few of them.
Mid-March, our 150 actors will be treading the boards of the Sel theatre in Sèvres, the musicians will be tuning up their myriad instruments, our very creative backstage warriors bustling in the wings. If you want to experience a spectacle of extravagant proportions, and if you think you can handle it, come to see The Great Gatsby!
Long live the Play!
Dates des représentations :
- mardi 23 mars (répétition générale),
- mercredi 24 mars
- jeudi 25 mars
- vendredi 26 mars
Lieu : SEL, 47 Grande Rue, à Sèvres
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Dernière modification le 01-05-10 par
