Writer and Director: Emma Hodgkinson
There have been a lot of Gatsbys in the last few years; immersive ones, musical ones and now Tethered Wits presents an open-air one which stops at The Actor’s Church in London in the final stages of its nationwide tour. Emma Hodgkinson is faithful to Fitzgerald in an adaptation that prioritises the narrative voice and the language of the creator while taking a less dreamy approach to the central love story to highlight the delusion of the characters instead.
When Nick Carraway takes a house on Long Island, he is thrown into the company of the glamourous Jordan Baker and her friends Tom and his wife Daisy Buchanan who happens to be a distant cousin of Nick’s. But it is the mysterious Jay Gatsby who commands his attention with lavish parties and an abiding love for Daisy that dominates their summer when the pair are reunited.
Adaptations of The Great Gatsby tend to focus on the parties, the whirlwind of faces, music and excess that fill only a relatively small part of the original novel but offer scenic designers and audiences a slice of nostalgia. In a programme essay, Hodgkinson actively rejects this approach for Tethered Wits and instead focuses on the external forces that shape the characters’ lives as well as their inability to see themselves as they really are –”just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had,” Nick notes several times in Hodgkinson’s script.
The blending of Fitzgerald’s voice and Nick’s narration is particularly well managed here, giving shape to scenes and activities by breaking off mid-conversation, as the character does in the book, to observe and comment on the unfolding experiences. And Oliver Stockley’s Nick is one of the strongest performances here, the calm outsider dazzled by the group he wanders into until he develops a dawning realisation they are not what he thought, a transition that Stockley charts especially well.
Into that frame, Hodgkinson inserts the remainder of the plot as largely acted sequences which proves a little less successful overall. Running at about 80 minutes of actual stage time, the story moves fast with little time to establish the characters in any detail or why they all matter to one another so much, not helped by a 30-minute interval which gives the audience a chance to disconnect. As the story hops from Nick and Gatsby to the full revival of his affair with Daisy and rapidly to its consequences, the more substantive interpretation of the novel that Hodgkinson aims starts to feel slight, reliant on hysterical and rapid emotional outbursts.
The best moment comes in Act Two as the characters head to the Plaza on a hot day and the extra-marital tensions within the group boil over. Given the space and content it requires to dig deep into the complex and contradictory motivations of each person with the twists and power changes that take place, this is a highly successful scene, one that implies the impact this Gatsby could have if the characters had a little more room to breath earlier in the play, establishing that connection with each other and the audience that brings about the eventual tragedies of their lives.
The cast do lots of doubling up including Rory Dulku as Gatsby and Wilson, Olivia Willis plays Daisy and Catherine, while Amelia Stanimeros blends Jordan and the poorly served Myrtle who are not always as distinct as they could be. Hodgkinson has an interesting point to make about the human frailty of these people hidden beneath their hedonistic surface, but the play needs to build up their mystery as Fitzgerald does before bringing them back down to earth.
Runs until 24 August 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
Interesting interpretation
