By Cal
Link: https://thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/the-great-gatsby
Available until: 31st March 2021
Age rating: 12+
The Great Gatsby is quite a complicated book. There are lots of different characters and although they are all different, they do play similar roles. Almost all of them seem to be married to one person and involved with someone else, or involved with two people. It can get quite confusing keeping track of all the affairs.
Wardrobe Theatre and the Wardrobe Ensemble have set themselves a bit of a challenge here. They perform the entire book with just two female (or perhaps non-binary, let’s be inclusive) actors, Tamsin Hurtado Clarke and Jesse Meadows.
They are both really good, but even having read the book (once) and seen the musical (once), I had to work quite hard to work out which characters they were playing so I wonder how easy it is for people who don’t know the story and the characters already. But the acting is so good, maybe everyone wants to put the hard work in in order to keep track of the characters. There’s no rule that theatre has to be easy, after all. (Or if there is, somebody obviously forgot to tell Shakespeare.)
The production is divided into chapters, which I’m guessing correspond to the chapters in the book, though if they don’t, what does it matter? It begins with a long quote from the novel to set the scene and there are a few more narrations throughout the production, along with a few asides from Nick. The other scenes are acted out.
Designer Katie Sykes has created a simple but functional and surprisingly versatile set. A sofa in the middle of the stage and various props (the phone is particularly inventive and I would have been absolutely thrilled by the cars if I hadn’t already seen the same thing in another play – though I don’t know how old this production is and The Great Gatsby might have got there first, but either way, the two companies probably thought of the idea entirely independently of one another).
Director Tom Brennan has asked a lot from his cast of two, but they’re more than capable. It’s a very physical production. There is lots of movement and dancing, with movement direction by Deepraj Singh. There’s music (not typical of the time but full of atmosphere, composed by Tom Crosley-Thorne) and there’s even a bit of mid-show artwork. It’s really clever. It seems to represent the inner emotional turmoil experienced by all the characters, which the conventions of the time don’t usually allow them to express.
One of the ladies (Jesse, I think) mostly plays Nick, who narrates the story, and Daisy, who is one of the stars, but Jesse does play other characters sometimes. Tamsin seems to play everyone else. All the scenes are so dynamic and I think even someone who isn’t sure who the characters are would enjoy watching a couple of great actors produce riveting scenes. The acting is excellent and the fact it’s a fun production actually makes the sad scenes hit you all the harder.
The Great Gatsby is a lot of fun and full of
creativity and talent.
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