At first blush, the idea of reading the entire text of The Great Gatsby on stage seems intriguing. Rather than approaching F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel through the inevitable reductiveness of adaptation, New York’s Elevator Repair Service would, presumably, present us with the Real Thing in Gatz. All seven hours of it.

Novels are mostly read in silence, their imaginings populating the fluid stage of the mind, but there remains a child-like pleasure in being read to. All the same, writing for the stage has different imperatives to those of prose; as Peter Brook points out, speaking of the particular problem of writing for the theatre, words on the stage “are only powerful in proportion to what they create in the language of theatre”. An author “is compelled to begin at the very root – by facing the problem of the very nature of dramatic utterance. There is no way out.”


I suppose I arrived with expectations. Foremost was that this exercise would force the company to face the question of language in the theatre “at the very root”. How would they deal with the interior imaginings of prose in the exterior world of theatre? What would this exercise reveal about language on the stage? About theatre itself? And in the end, this is my disappointment with the show. Instead of bringing the novel to life, Elevator Repair Service turned it into a fetish object. Yes, every word, down to the last “and”, was there. Why it was necessary or interesting to do this escaped me entirely.

It begins promisingly enough. Louisa Thompson’s set is a hyper-realistic, dingy office (perhaps a business selling bonds, like Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway). On one side are shelves of dilapidated files, in the centre a desk with an ancient computer, to the back a windowed wall with a door, and a glassed reception area. A rumpled man (Scott Shepherd) enters with a take-away coffee and begins his working day. He hangs up his coat and turns on his computer, but it won’t start. He presses the reset button, takes a swig from his coffee, opens a file and discovers a battered paperback copy of The Great Gatsby. Out of boredom and curiosity, he begins to read it out loud as the office comes to life around him.

Stroke by stroke, the office workers become the characters in the book, the fictional reality gradually inhabiting the humdrum world of the office until it takes over entirely. This transition, which takes place slowly (some might say, unremittingly) over the four parts of the show, might have had more power if the world of the office had had more reality in the first place. I began to get twitchy in the first twenty minutes: the actions of the workers made no sense at all. Every gesture was incomplete: the performers opened files and closed them, they waved bits of paper in each other’s faces, they made inaudible phone calls. Shepherd kept pressing his reset button, but without waiting for the necessary time for his computer to reboot. (I once had a computer just like that). I began, even then, to wonder how deeply thought this production was.

Part of my impatience stems from having recently seen Daniel Schlusser’s Peer Gynt, which similarly posited two simultaneous stage realities, a mundane present and a fictional imagining. In this case, the relationship between the two realities was complex and shifting; both were highly stylised, but each had its own integrity, a quality emerging in part from some profound theatrical thinking about the source text and its relationship to the present, and by focused performances. The approach in Gatz seemed, in comparison, startlingly tame and unthought. The office world looked more and more like a gimmick which never paid off: it was abandoned early, with scarcely a glance back, and the novel took over. This sense of uncertainty was intensified by the uneven performances, which ranged from Gary Wilmes’s powerful evocation of Tom Buchanan to shallow and obvious parody which involved a lot of mugging to the audience.

By part two, the company was – with occasional meaningless office interruptions - “acting out” the novel. Shepherd read every word of the narrative, with the actors providing the dialogue, down to the last “he said”. (This particularly bothered me, and is part of what I mean by their fetishising the prose. Why not cut these phrases? The tautological joke was funny for ten minutes but soon became merely tedious: dialogue indicators in novels are designed to be invisible to the reading eye, necessary pointers that become wholly redundant on stage). I began to suffer from a strange sort of double vision: every action described in the prose was slavishly illustrated by the performers. I began to long for the actors to do something different from the writing, for a little bit of spin or wit. Or anything, really. But no. This went on for the next three thousand hours.

You have to admire the athletic persistence of the actors, and it must be said that Shepherd has a nice reading style, although with a tendency, forgivable perhaps, to lose himself in the hypnotic rhythms of the prose. To be fair, there were times, amounting to perhaps an hour or two of the whole show, when I began to see how this approach might make exciting theatre – but these moments were always the most dramatic parts of the novel, where the dialogue was closest to a conventional play. The theatre presented was, in the end, informed by wholly conventional ideas and never questioned anything, beyond some obvious grammatical jokes, about the qualities of written or spoken language.

What saved me was the novel itself, which remains as brilliant as it ever was. But Gatsby’s tragedy and the “foul trash” floating in the wake of the American dream remain all Fitzgerald’s vision. If anything, Gatz demonstrates how futile the idea of geekish fidelity can be on stage. Or how contradictory it is: this faithfulness, if it did anything at all, merely diminished Fitzgerald’s prose.

It was a relief, then, to see Rochelle Carmichael’s Clickity Clack and Aoroi, two short dance pieces presented at Theatreworks. They are backed by a miscellany of music, including the soundtracks from The Matrix and Donnie Darko, a strange mulch that I ended up enjoying more than I expected. Combining circus, black light puppetry and physical theatre, Clickity Clack is a witty take on the erotics of dress with some wonderful costumes – a skirt levitated by red helium balloons, a cut-out paper business suit with a huge bow tie – and some fun reveals. Aoroi seems to be a concept taken straight from a fantasy art website, with fairies creeping out from beneath a curtain, half insect, half human, to play their amoral and predatory games. Despite some muddy movement, which took the edge off a little, these are seductive pieces, with a touch of the exuberant embrace of popular kitsch that animates so much of BalletLab’s work.


Lastly, I made an unplanned visit to the STC’s production of The Wonderful World of Dissocia, Anthony Neilson’s play about the psychotic breakdown of a woman called Lisa Jones (Justine Clarke). There’s something brilliantly crude about this work: the first half is a subjective enactment of delusional reality, the second a starkly minimal picture of its consequences. The excess of the first half is characterised by over-the-top, cabaret theatricality, delivered through some first-class performances. Lisa’s journey through Dissocia shows us a world that, like Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, is at once funny, disorientating and darkly violent, a place where words have their own sinister life, like the ambiguous smile of a Cheshire cat. The second half shifts to another kind of theatre altogether, a minimal and unsparing realism that is all the more powerful for its contrast to what has happened earlier.

Marion Pott’s production is beautifully modulated. She catches the surreality of the first half through some hilarious and inventive theatre-making (with the help of some truly eye-burning costumes by Tess Schofield and Nick Schlieper’s lighting). After interval, the grassy field that constitutes the first stage lifts to become the oppressively low ceiling of the second set, lit with a neon harshness. Lisa’s bed and bedside table huddle forlornly in the corner, and the various staff and visitors who interact with her – making sure she takes her medication, confiscating her Walkman, blaming her for her lack of responsibility – have to walk in and out for the length of the stage. These scenes were delicately handled and cumulatively very moving. I don’t think I’ve seen a more compelling evocation of the isolating loneliness and disempowerment of mental illness.

Pictures: top: Elevator Repair Service's Gatz; bottom: The Wonderful World of Dissocia, STC.

Gatz, from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Directed by John Collins, set by Louisa Thimpson, lighting design by Mark Barton, sound design by Ben Williams. With Scott Shepherd, Jim Fletcher, Kate Scelsa, Sibyl Kempson, Lucy Taylor, Gary Wilmes, Vin Knight, Frank Boyd, Annie McNamara, Ben Williams, Laurena Allan, Mike Iveson and Ross Fletcher, Elevator Repair Service @ the Sydney Opera House until May 31.

Clickity Clack and Aroi, directed and co-choregraphed by Rochelle Carmichael. Lighting design by Thomas Lambert, costumes by Rochelle Carmichael, Michael Kopp, Sera Carmichael and Christina Smith. Danced by Kathryn Newnham, Caroline Meaden, Alice Dixon and Michael Kopp. Liquid Skin @ Theatreworks until May 31.

The Wonderful World of Dissocia by Anthony Nielson, directed by Marion Potts. Set design by Alice Babidge, costumes by Tess Schofield, lighting design by Nick Schlieper, music composed by Alan John, sound design by David Franzke. With Kate Box, Justine Clarke, Matt Day, Michelle Doake, Russell Dykstra, Socratis Otto, Justin Smith and Matthew Whittet. Sydney Theatre Company, closed.

Relocated, written and directed by Anthony Neilson. Designed by Miriam Buether, lighting by Chahine Yavroyan, sound design by Nick Powell. With Frances Grey, Phil McKee, Staurt McQuarrie, Katie Novak, Jan Pearson and Nicola Walker. Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, Sloane Square, London, until July 5.

Despite my stern resolutions to do other things while in London - like, oh, I don't know, photographing Beefeaters or climbing the Tower of London - Ms TN gave in and decided to go to the theatre after all. After reading various responses to Anthony Neilson’s Relocated, from Michael Billington’s notorious one star review to our Euro-trotting Jana’s indignant defence, curiosity overwhelmed me. And so, on Friday night, I found myself at the Royal Court Upstairs.

When they say Upstairs, they mean Upstairs. I think I made my way up five flights and then, after I'd climbed all that way, I entered a space that felt like an underground bunker. Miriam Buether’s impressive design is not for claustrophobes: it features a black, low-roofed stage furnished with chairs and other objects painted black, and lit by dingy naked lightbulbs.


The stage is separated from the audience by a coarse scrim, so you are effectively peering into a box, creating that sense of voyeurism which seems to be a bit of a staple of contemporary theatre. In a neat touch that increases the voyeuristic frisson, the angle of the stage means that you can watch through the scrim as the rest of the audience enters the space. And then came what turned out to be my uneasiest moment of the night: the ushers shut the doors. I suddenly thought, what if there’s a fire? How do we get out?

It's not a thought that usually occurs to me in the theatre, and is no doubt a tribute to the oppressive effect of Buether’s design and Chahine Yavroyan’s parsimonious lighting, which is more a play of shadows on darkness than of light on shadow. The production they shape is certainly effective, well performed by a good cast and, for the most part, stylishly done. Yet on the way home I was overwhelmed by waves of irritation. I wasn’t offended, I wasn’t mystified, I wasn’t even angry. I was annoyed.

I've spent the whole day attempting to unpack this irritation. And I found that the more I thought about the production, the less there seemed to be think about. On the surface, Relocated is a Lynch-esque nightmare about identity, a peek under the skin of suburbia to its murderous neuroses and alienations, a fantasia of contemporary anxieties. That's certainly how it's dressed. But in the end, it doesn't really offer much more than a solidly visceral sensation of sitting in the dark.

It opens with a woman who is vacuuming and listening to the BBC news when she suddenly collapses. What follows is a series of nightmarish scenes, perhaps occurring in the moment of her death, since the show also ends with the image of the fallen woman. The play is a splintered narrative that splices Josef Fritzl, the incestuous imprisoner of his own daughter, with Connie/Marjorie/Kelly, a woman who, like Maxine Carr, is an unwitting accomplice to the murder of two 12 year old girls by her partner, and who is continually moved around the country under different identities for her protection.

Unlike others who have seen Relocated, I wasn’t disturbed by the ethics of the direct references to current events, although perhaps I should have been. The jarring effect of employing and distorting recognisable news stories wasn’t (for me, anyway) a question of “going too far”; but I did think it was exploitative. What bothered me was how the references literalised the play: they give the mind a handle of explanation which is then, despite variants and wandering storylines, impossible to ignore. The show is hamstrung by the kind of tabloid sensationalist banality which (perhaps) it seeks to critique.

The most effective moments are when the production is most restrained. There is a domestic scene, for instance, when one partner talks about children "upstairs" needing a bath, while the other, shocked, denies that they have any children at all. This moment, and a few others like it, begin to generate a genuine unease, a sense of dislocated, amnesiac identity; but this is hijacked almost immediately by the sudden flagging of contemporary news stories: a topicality, if you like, that erases relevance. It left me on the surface of things grappling with “issues”, rather than underneath the skin, grubbing about in the subconscious.

I suppose I might have liked to see something like the poise in Henry James's brilliant horror story The Turn of the Screw, which is a text so finely balanced that it is impossible to know whether it is a ghost story or an account by a sexually neurotic and destructive woman. Neilson might claim that he is challenging such elegance: certainly Relocated is full of loose ends. But for my money, rather than challenging the idea of narrative causality, these end up merely drifting, creating neither a dramatic narrative nor an oneiric anti-narrative, but rather something with a bet each way.

That sense of scrappiness no doubt emerges from Neilson's process, which is to devise texts during rehearsals. There's nothing in principle wrong with this, but in this production it's hard to see what the advantage is: effectively you have a play that works in the same ways other plays do, but without the benefit of reflective writing time. There are lyrical moments - for example, Connie's recorded assertion of her identity towards the end - that certainly reach towards very writerly ambitions.

And perhaps, too, I had been told too often that it was frightening. I avoid horror films, being rather too vulnerable to suspenseful sound effects and sudden leaps on the protagonist out of shadowy doorways, and I was prepared to have to steady my nerves with a stiff drink afterwards. And, rather to my disappointment, it didn't frighten me at all. The lighting design uses the effect of total blackout a few times too often. While at first it exerts its disorientating power, leaving you with that curious sense that your body's boundaries are now amorphous, by the fourth or fifth blackout it was, for all the inventiveness of Nick Powell’s soundscape of children’s cries and atmospheric electronic noises, just sitting in the dark, waiting for the next scene.

Neilson’s direction, imaginative and precise though it is, suffers from a sense of repetitiveness: not the repetition of scenes as variations, an aspect I found interesting, but from a rather unvarying directorial rhythm. (Reveal, hide, reveal, hide, more darkness…) I suspect this was a major reason I found myself checking my watch, which is a bad sign in a 90 minute show. But I think what primarily prompted my post-show irritation was a feeling of emptiness: for all the physical sensorium it provided, the production never connected into any deeper poetic recognition. I didn't feel anything.

Before the show, I bought the script of Marius von Mayenberg's The Ugly One - presently on in a return season downstairs at the Royal Court - and I read it on the way home. It makes a striking contrast to Relocated, because Mayenberg understands the value and strictness of theatrical metaphor. The Ugly One is, oddly enough, another essay on identity, a wickedly funny and painful exploration of the meaning of the face. I suppose there is a value in being annoyed - it doesn't in truth happen very often - but I couldn't help wishing I had seen Mayenberg's play instead.

Picture: Jan Pearson in Relocated at the Royal Court. Photo: Johan Persson