Adelaide festival | The Guardian: A man enters his office in the morning, finds his computer on the fritz and, after a few attempts to turn it on and off again, comes across a copy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. So he starts to read and when his colleagues enter they find themselves taking on the characters, and soon the novel unfolds around us, word by word. The New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service has produced a work that is not quite adaptation – given it doesn’t really adapt the novel at all – but that is utterly transfixing nonetheless.
1 comment:
I find it very interesting the choice to make any kind of live performance so long, so I assume it must be incredibly strong choices made to justify this decision. It seems as if the political take on Gatsby is a very strong choice to criticize the untra-wealthy, the ruling class that doesn’t care, which I again find very interesting to focus on in such a long production because of the privilege it takes to gain proper access to a performance of this nature. I don’t mean just literally getting a ticket, but additionally having the leisure time to see such a long production. To work an entire day around seeing theater is also a privilege, and I assume with such a large production, a hefty ticket price initially. This message is then going exactly to those who need it. I’m also interested in this choice of production length because of the current “standard” attention span being so short. Or at least, that’s what we are told- we have short attention spans. Whenever I see live productions I challenge this idea, I find it really refreshing. Perhaps our attention spans aren’t entirely deteriorated, and perhaps there are ways to claim the attention of the upper class with art, and perhaps there is hope to educate them.
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