Back to the Roaring Twenties for the only party in town
Will ‘The Great Gatsby’ set the template for Covid-safe theatre? By Dominic Cavendish
I’m in a mansion in Mayfair in the grim 2020s, yet I feel I’ve travelled 3,000 miles away, and a century back in time. This is Gatsby-land: a series of intricate environments designed to evoke the hedonistic world of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece The Great Gatsby.
One moment I’m in an art deco speakeasy, where Nick Carraway
– the narrator of Fitzgerald’s timeless tale of affluence and unfulfillment – is declaiming the book’s immortal closing line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The next I’m being teasingly accosted by Myrtle Wilson – the adulterous car mechanic’s wife – asking me: “Hey, do you like this dress?” Briefly I catch a glimpse – watching, smiling, serene, enigmatic – of Gatsby himself.
The longest-running immersive theatre production in the UK (before Covid forced it to close), director Alexander Wright’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby has been reimagined to meet government coronavirus guidelines and opened its doors to paying customers again last night.
A number of factors allowed it to stage a comeback while other shows like The Mousetrap (which recently shelved plans to reopen this month) have admitted defeat. For one thing, the spaciousness of what’s on offer at this imposing former drill hall (erstwhile home to Queen Victoria’s Rifles) stands in stark contrast to the kind of auditoria most theatregoers are used to. Even though the show, which came here last year after stints elsewhere in London (and prior to that, originally, in 2015, in York) only occupies some of the 32,000 sq ft area (affording eight locations for Gatsby in all), there’s an ampleness and accent on audience mobility that stands the usual theatre model on its head.
As Louis Hartshorn – one half of the show’s dynamic producing duo (with Brian Hook, a fellow Mancunian and the same age, 32) – puts it: “I think [ The Mousetrap’s postponement] gives more evidence that most traditional theatre is out of options.” He’s not gloating here, he’s also executive director of London’s Arts Theatre, so knows full well the plight of those venues where reopening with social distancing isn’t viable (and which, even if it is, face an uphill battle in terms of mounting anything).
Yet there’s still an air of energy and optimism about him – as there is with Hook, and with director Wright, also 32, who joins the conversation. Like the passageway they’ve secreted in Gatsby’s library, for the curious to find, they might just have unlocked a new level of theatrical opportunity in the nick of time.
Immersive theatre – where audience-members get a 360-degree experience, and an invitation to participate proactively in the action – already looked in a strong position at the start of the year. After burgeoning as a pioneering form at the beginning of the 2000s with companies like Punchdrunk and Shunt, an increased professionalism in the practice took hold; one of the leading exponents in the field today, Secret Cinema, which specialises in creating huge events related to major cinema classics and new releases, signed a tie-in deal with Disney earlier this year. Confidence seems to have survived not just despite but because of coronavirus. Hook and Hartshorn have this week expanded their team when other companies are laying off staff, and the former says: “I’ve never had so many conventional and big West End theatre producers pick up the phone and say, ‘How do we work in the immersive sector?’ ”
It’s like a paradigm shift. As Wright explains: “Most shows are presented on a stage because that’s the usual rule – that we sit in rows, face one way and stay still for a few hours. If the rule now is: you can’t sit next to anyone else, and you can’t be packed in, that may well change the way we think.”
This isn’t an easy street option. There has been a significant investment in an air purification system and UV kit that will sterilise each of the eight performance spaces.
Besides a backstage scheme delineating “bubbles” for the actors that are so meticulous some won’t encounter each other during the run of performances, the ability to Covid-test the actors (at least once a fortnight) and temperaturecheck the audience is a given, too.
They need to sell 100 per cent of the reduced capacity (down from 240 to 90) to meet costs and even then it’s barely viable. The key test though, Hook says, has been met: “The biggest leap into the unknown was putting the show back on sale. Will anyone come? And yes, they’re buying tickets.”
The source of the appeal isn’t hard to fathom. As Hartshorn observes when we talk before the reopening, now more than ever, there’s a yearning for escapism, for a big party. “People have been starved of that opportunity to transport themselves to another world,” he says. “It’s going to be incredibly moving to have an audience back at the theatre – we’re providing a welcome contrast to everything they’ve been going through.” Wright adds: “Sometimes more important than the act of theatre itself is giving people a reason to gather – they’ll be doing that in a way they haven’t done for ages.”
Albeit distanced, obviously (there’s a metre-plus rule between different groups), and face-masked (a masquerade concept has been draped over the show) and not able to roam quite as freely as before. Yet the attention to detail – with some 45 permutations of seeing the show still possible (eight hours of material are aired across its two-hour running time) – betrays the passion of all involved.
There’s no chance now for the previous audience-participation Charleston but the choreographers “have been working flat out to figure
The audience can no longer join in the Charleston, but they can play Gatsby’s staff
out how we keep the energy going through the roof – I think we’ve got there,” Wright says.
And he further cites just one example of Covid-catalysed ingenuity: “We’re not seeing the rules around the pandemic as a reason to distance the audience from the narrative – but as a reason for finding different routes in. So for instance, there’s a scene where four audience members set up a tea party that’s pivotal to the action – it’s where Daisy and Gatsby meet and rekindle their relationship. It would be easy for us to go: ‘We can’t do that because the audience aren’t allowed to touch stuff.’ But now they will put on white gloves and aprons so they’re dressed like Gatsby’s staff – within the image we’ve dovetailed a safe way of doing things.”
Rather like the eerie gaze of the billboard figure of Dr T J Eckleburg in the novel, the eyes of the industry are upon them. Wright believes there’ll be an enhanced mood of sadness in the production now as our bewildered age fully connects with Fitzgerald’s, which, beneath its surface gaiety, was reeling from the shock of the First World War and its aftermath.
Perhaps the survival of the show would constitute a kind of happy ending, but in any event its existence is a marker in the sand. “It feels like we’re in the vanguard,” Hook says. “If we don’t have a go, then we’ve lost anyway. We will either go bankrupt or nail it.”
The Great Gatsby runs at Immersive LDN, 56 Davies Street, London W1; immersivegatsby.com