Great Gatsby at Pitlochry Theatre review – Uneven art-deco spectacle

The National

12 hours ago

Pitlochry Festival Theatre
ELIZABETH Newman (who is now leading Sheffield Theatres) recently relinquished her position as artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre (PFT) following a very successful six-year stint at the 'theatre in the hills'. However, she bequeaths to her successor – the acclaimed Scottish actor Alan Cumming – a final summer programme that includes her own stage adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's iconic novel The Great Gatsby.
Even before we get to Newman's airy, fast-paced script, designer Jen McGinley's set – which is a maximalist, Art Deco construction – has us very firmly in the United States during the "roaring twenties'.
The design – which reminds us that PFT boasts the finest carpenters since Jesus – summons up the grandeur of the conspicuously expensive home of the titular man of wealth, but it also serves a number of practical purposes.
The most important of these is the platform above the stage, which the performers access by way of sweeping staircases on the left and right of the stage. This platform hosts a band made up of actor-musicians and actor-singers who play short tasters of music and songs that evoke the optimism and decadence (for the middle and upper classes, at least) of the 1920s in America.
First published in 1925, Fitzgerald's tale is one in which the complex, nouveau riche Jay Gatsby is an archetypal square peg in the round hole of the Ivy League-educated upper classes. As such – as well as owing a discernible debt to Tolstoy – the novel seems almost to prophecy the devastating Wall Street Crash of 1929.
In recent times, PFT has become the undisputed leader where Scottish musical theatre is concerned. It should come as little surprise, then, that Newman and director Sarah Brigham have adapted this much-loved prose fiction as a play with songs.
There is a wealth of musical and singing talent in this cast (which, typically of PFT, is drawn from the theatre's summer season ensemble). Fiona Wood – who plays Daisy Buchanan (the long-suffering wife of Tyler Collins's appropriately obnoxious, snobbish bourgeois Tom Buchanan) – is especially impressive when she takes to the microphone as a cabaret chanteuse.
Although the acting and singing is somewhat uneven at times, the production boasts a number of strong performances. For instance, David Rankine (in the role of the inquisitive narrator Nick Carraway) does a fine job of guiding the audience on its journey of discovery.
I have always agreed with the American theatrologist Richard Schechner about the need for theatre productions to employ 'blind casting', or, at the very least, casting that goes against identity-driven assumptions about character. There is no reason why we should not have a female Hamlet or, as we have here, a Black Gatsby.
However – given the accuracy of Fitzgerald's picture of US society in the early to mid-1920s – it takes considerable suspension of disbelief to imagine the east coast upper classes granting any level of acceptance to a suddenly wealthy African-American. That said, Oraine Johnson gives an energetic-yet-vulnerable performance that chimes nicely with his famous character.
Various dates until September 25: pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com