The decadence, the selfishness, the ostentation and the carelessness of the American rich post WW1 was exquisitely captured by the young novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in turn by this elegant stage production.

It’s faithful to the novel but acknowledges that theatre is a different beast – the dance and music segments work beautifully and the cast of eight populate the stage as many different characters during the evening.

Miranda Manasiadis, in her welcome return to the stage, brings a Blanche du Bois emotional and physical fragility to the part of Daisy, Gatsby’s unhealthy obsession and the chattel of her husband Tom (Paul Harrop). Nathan Meister’s Gatsby is more restrained than the Gatsby of my imagination but that’s no bad thing, and Guy Langford is a touchingly bewildered soul as the young Nick, who painfully comes to understand the hollowness of his fabulously wealthy new friends. 

Jessica Robinson and Erin Banks are strong in support as Tom’s ill-fated lover Myrtle and the coolly detached Jordan. Danny Mulheron has an absolute ball in his myriad roles, from pianist to Gatsby’s drunken squatter to the tormented Wilson.

As the narrator Ray Henwood, as do some of the others, struggles to hold onto the American accent but gives the older Nick a nice touch of world weariness.

Brian King’s elegant stage and costume design are complemented by Lisa Maule’s bold lighting. Michael Nicholas Williams’ music is lovely, but the music means some scenes, notably the party sequences, are almost impossible to hear. This is a pity, when Fitzgerald writes with such lyricism and wit.

It’s a brave playwright who would think to transform one of the seminal 20^th century novels into a play, and Ken Duncum was the man for the job. Combining his script with David O’Donnell’s risk-taking direction and a splendid cast means devotees of Fitzgerald’s novel should leave the play contented and those who haven’t read it encouraged to give it a go. 
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Our imaginations have to provide the forty acres of well-manicured lawns and gardens surrounding Jay Gatsby’s glittering Long Island mansion. However, the modernity (a hint of art deco) and the colossal mansion are impressively created by Brian King in his monumental setting for this skillful and sensitive adaption by Ken Duncum of Fitzgerald’s famous novel.

Duncum writes in the programme on why he adapted the novel for the stage: Like most great works of literature, you can slice this tomato in many different ways. He has sliced it theatrically with the emphasis on the moral effects of the high life on the narrator Nick Carroway, who is played with a touch of a Shakespearean Chorus by Ray Henwood as the older Nick and by Guy Langford excellent as the young Nick dazzled by the glamour of it all until his conscience forces him to retreat to his roots in the traditional Mid-West.

If you saw The 39 Steps, Travels with My Aunt and many others you’ll know the style: the cast playing multiple characters, rapid scene changes, and the use of mime and surprising props such as a fox fur. Except, of course, it isn’t a comedy or a farce, but a prescient account of the hollowness of life in the 20^th century.

Amazingly, there is very little that has been omitted and Duncum never forgets that he is creating a play so that when Fitzgerald describes the amoral Jordan Baker (vividly realized by Erin Banks) cheating at golf he turns Fitzgerald’s four sentences into a flickering silent movie newsreel of a golf tournament. The briefly described musical entertainment at one of Gatsby’s parties, Jazz History of the World, becomes a fully-fledged musical song and dance sequence and the opening to the second half has everyone singing and dancing to Ain’t We Got Fun.

The sequences of the novel that take place in “the valley of the ashes”, the grey working-class area between Long Island and New York, which the well-to-do ignore except when they need gas for their expensive cars, are given life by Danny Mulheron as the decent but tortured Wilson and by Jessica Robinson (who also sings the opening song with Merman-like force) as his two-timing wife, Myrtle. Neither the setting nor the lighting, however, gives them much support.

As Myrtle’s lover, Paul Harrop comes on a bit too strongly at times as the villain of the piece, and while Nathan Meister’s Gatsby shines in a white suit he radiates the mystery and glamour of this obsessive man. The object of his obsession is the frivolous Daisy, whose ‘voice is full of money,’ and she is played with a fierce brittleness by Miranda Manasiadis that is exactly right, particularly during the ‘shirt’ scene which becomes a delirious dance of luxury that ends in tears.

Overall, an amazing achievement.

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Completed five years before the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression of 1929, F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel – which was not an instant best-seller – can be seen in retrospect as a prescient cautionary tale about the moral paucity of nouveau-riche capitalists. History has certainly repeated itself on that score ever since, including very recently.

As I recall it, the 1974 film (starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan) was a hit with the baby boomers because it simultaneously critiqued American capitalism, celebrated anti-conservative hedonism, and was deeply and tragically romantic.  

Local playwright Ken Duncum’s view that the various films stripped the novel of its poetry, and that a stage adaptation can retain it, is valid. This David O’Donnell-directed production on Brian King’s three-tiered set with its art deco touches and the staircase to and from happiness at its centre, certainly makes a virtue of blending the older Nick Carraway’s questing narration with the live re-enactments and stylised evocations that theatre does best. (The script has evolved significantly since its Court Theatre premiere last year.)

What lies at its heart is Carraway’s dilemma: in the light of what happened, how does one judge Jay (Jimmy) Gatsby, the poor Minnesota farm boy who – mentored by the wealthy goldminer whose yacht he spotted and boarded – dreamed of a brilliant future at the age of 17, rose through the ranks as he did his military duty in ‘The Great War’ then went on to make ‘a killing’, as they say, by hooking up with a canny New York businessman to supply bootleg alcohol to a freedom-wanting market despite the repressive forces of prohibition.

Sure he opted for opulence with his new-found wealth but he shared it around, either to salve his conscience, or to win friends and influence people, or to prove himself worthy at last of his first and only love Daisy, who threw him over, when he was penniless, for Tom Buchanan, a mid-western sports hero from a very wealthy family. Gatsby has built his Long Island mansion across the bay from where they live and his entire life seems to be focussed on the green light that marks the jetty near her place.

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us,” is the way Carraway recalls it as the play ends. “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning … So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” It’s a state of mind that speaks very clearly of – and to – each new generation, which is why it qualifies as a modern classic.

Ray Henwood does a marvellous job of drawing us into old Nick’s quest, with O’Donnell’s direction, Lisa Maule’s lighting and Stephen Gallagher’s sound (operated by Isaac Heron) and the ensemble cast conspiring splendidly to bring his recollections alive. Indeed there are some stunning moments where collisions of light, sound and action leave us swearing we’ve really just seen what we’ve been provoked to imagine.

As the younger Nick, Guy Langford captures perfectly his ‘innocent abroad in the land of luxury’ ambivalence, challenging us to admit that we too would find it attractive … up to a point. And the key moment at which he attempts to sever all connection with that lifestyle, and all it stands for, is powerfully marked.

In a welcome return to the Wellington stage, Miranda Manasiadis makes Daisy delightful and maddening in equal measure, which is just as it should be. Her understanding of how disempowered she is as a woman is poignantly expressed when she says of her daughter, “I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” But it’s Gatsby who observes, “Her voice is full of money … that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it … high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl!” You can see what Duncum means about the poetry.

A thesis could be written about just what makes Daisy tick, especially given the events that spell the end of romance and lay the ground for the aftermath; details I won’t reveal here except to say it is worth pondering afterwards who ends up dead and why, who survives and why, and which value systems have gone on to support ‘success’ in modern America. Terms like ‘old money’, ‘sense of entitlement’ and ‘teflon coated’ spring to mind.  

Nathan Meister embodies the enigma that is Gatsby with the requisite style and panache; generous to a fault, reasonably secretive and only specifically dishonest once: a chivalrous act which proves fatal.

The closest we get to a clear-cut villain is Paul Harrop’s stern and volatile Tom Buchanan, revealed as a morally hypocritical control-freak whose views on race, marriage and male rights were all too common in that era (and still seethe underground today). While his values define the status quo of the time and will be challenged strongly by the next generation, we are compelled to note that it’s he who goes on to thrive in the aftermath. America protects his kind.

Erin Banks is impulsive, independent and emotionally detached as young Nick’s love interest Jordan Baker. As a competitive golfer, she turns out to have queered her pitch (fiddled her lie?) on the integrity front. But she’s finally vulnerable too, beneath the assured façade, which gives her character depth.

Having set the mood beautifully with a ‘torch’ song, Jessica Robinson also brings compelling credibility to Tom’s social-climbing mistress Myrtle, pretentiously dissatisfied with her hard working, honest and God-fearing husband George Wilson, who earns his living pumping gas and fixing automobiles, and is played with simple truth by Danny Mulheron.

Mulheron also finds an old world authenticity in Gatsby’s shrewd business partner Meyer Wolfsheim, and plays the ‘owl-eyed’ left-over from one of the weekly parties who in turn plays the grand piano.

Adding greatly to the evocation of the times and the energy of the show are the song and dance routines, like ‘Ain’t We Got Fun’, choreographed by Sascha Copeland with musical direction by Michael Nicholas Williams, who has also composed a lively new show-stopping number to lyrics by Ken Duncum: ‘A Jazz History of the World’.

I like that the costumes – designer Brian King; costumier Jane Boocock – are effectively true to the period without turning the show into a fashion parade. The way O’Donnell, his cast and the production team have pitched Duncum’s take on The Great Gatsby ensures we can readily identify with the characters’ experiences, questions and choices and test our own value systems against them.

This is a world where the greatest thing you can do, not only for yourself but for America, is make money, and it’s bad taste to ask too many questions about how exactly that’s done. But nowadays we are very focussed on questions of integrity around great wealth, which makes this story well worth revisiting.  
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