Accidental literary trilogy complete
Best known for an eight-hour performance of The Great Gatsby,
New York-based theatre company Elevator Repair Service is paring it down with its latest show, a take on Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, on as part of the New Zealand Festival.
Set in post-World War I Europe, the novel, and subsequent staging, follows a group of aimless American and British expatriates as they drink away the horrors of war.
Actor Mike Iveson, who plays protagonist Jake Barnes, has been involved with the show since its inception almost a decade ago and says while it’s difficult to adapt such a well-known text, it’s the ensemble’s bread and butter.
‘‘The company is interested in un-performing things; novels are supposed to be a weird, intimate relationship between the reader and the writer so translating that to the stage is awkward and that’s what we’re interested in.
‘‘We don’t want to just do an adaptation.’’
Director John Collins initially toyed with the idea of adapting Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms but settled on The Sun Also Rises; a decision that sat well with the cast.
‘‘Though Hemingway is known for his luxurious descriptions of passing landscapes and encounters with nature, we were instantly attracted to his dialogue. Crisp, witty and almost contemporary, the banter among the characters seemed to have been written for our actors,’’ Collins says.
Lucy Taylor, who plays Brett Ashley, says it instantly felt like a perfect fit for the American cast.
‘‘I think that there was something attractive to us because we had just spent the last five years travelling around Europe doing these plays and so this idea of a group of badly behaved people, travelling around representing American culture and appropriating aspects of European culture, seemed attractive,’’ she says.
Despite the novel having been written in 1926, Taylor says audiences will be surprised by ‘‘how modern it is’’.
However, she acknowledges the text hasn’t aged well in some aspects.
‘‘It’s incredibly problematic in terms of racism, anti-semitism ... we’ve kept some of it but obviously not everything. ‘‘You want to be faithful to the text and not sanitise it.’’
This production of The Select (The Sun Also Rises) is the third time the company has adapted a modern American novel for the stage; essentially creating a trilogy in the process.
‘‘We had done two adaptations – Gatz [a take on F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby] and [William Faulkner’s] The Sound and the
Fury – but it was never designed to be a trilogy. We had no intention of doing a third but someone in the company made the suggestion that we look at Hemingway and entertain the idea,’’ Taylor says.
Unlike Gatz, which has an eight-hour run time, The Sun Also Rises clocks in at just under three.
‘‘It still has the thing that the other shows have, which is the word-for-word thing, so we’re not changing the text but we have cut out some sections, especially when things weren’t sticking,’’ Iveson says.
With the show having been devised in 2009, Taylor says she’s looking forward to seeing how it’s received by Kiwi audiences, nine years on.
‘‘Culture and politics change so much and so fast these days so I’m interested to know how people respond to this piece now than they did back then.’’