The Great Gatsby will play at the Cockpit Theatre between Thursday 28th November and Saturday 14th December. Tickets are £18 (£14 for concessions) and can be purchased here: https://www.thecockpit.org.uk/show/the_great_gatsby
- What excites you the most about bringing your adaptation of The Great Gatsby to The Cockpit?
The most exciting part is that we’re staging it in the round, which immediately pulls us into a very intimate setting. The novel is known for its opulence and decadence which we have preserved, but this new level of intimacy invites us into the larger-than-life world of Gatsby – you’ll want to get up and start dancing with the cast!
- How have preparations been for the show?
We’ve been sitting on this one for a long time, working, reworking, scheming and planning, so it’s incredibly exhilarating to see the finish line in sight! It’s our biggest and most ambitious project yet, so a small part of us can’t believe it’s really real. To be in these rooms making theatre with our company members is all we’ve longed for and it’s such a privilege. Grateful is a really great word to sum it all up. Right now, we’re at the stage of production where everyone is firing on all cylinders: living, breathing and dreaming Gatsby. It’s so exciting to watch the company’s hard work come together!
- Tell us more about the creative process behind the show. How did you go about writing and producing the show?
We knew we wanted to reinvent a classic, but didn’t want to just do it for the sake of it. We wanted to make sure we had something new to say. And when we were looking at plays that we knew, novels that we liked, The Great Gatsby came up and suddenly our concept fell into place. After a little more research, we realised that no one had explored Gatsby from this perspective and we knew we had to scratch that itch!
Queering the central love story of The Great Gatsby beautifully warps the metaphor about the American Dream into a broader longing for equality. It also pays homage to the silenced queer experience of the 1920s and the long list of incredible women who did extraordinary things to push back against the limits of society. Looking at the novel this way brought about nuances in the text that we hadn’t noticed before and it imbues our adaptation with a whole new set of layers to explore.
- How are the themes from Fitzgerald’s quintessential Jazz Age novel still relevant today?
Part of the reason that Gatsby has endured for so long already is because its themes are so well-crafted and readily translate onto the human experience today. Filled with the glamour of 1920s New York, the classic tells a heartbreaking tale of love, loss and social stratification, revealing the hard-hitting truth behind the ‘American Dream’. Love and loss are such universal experiences and, with the ever-increasing wealth gap, limited social mobility, and cost of living crisis, the themes of social stratification are still strikingly relevant today. Need we start on the state of the ‘American Dream’ and the political landscape of America?
Our thrilling new adaptation remains faithful to the text and its original themes while breathing new life and new meaning into the story, reminding us simultaneously how far we’ve come and how much further we have to go to achieve true equality.
- Why do you think artists are still choosing to return to The Great Gatsby, and why is it so important to adapt Fitzgerald’s iconic novel today?
Gatsby taps into base human desires and the impossibility of dreams. It’s such fertile ground for any artist. We’ve been turning over these ideas for centuries and we will continue to do so for as long as we can because the truth is that there are no concrete answers or definitive meanings behind it all. And that’s what makes it such a beautiful playground to explore.
For us, it was about finding our own sense of meaning from it and then making that into a juicy offering for audiences this winter.
We discovered a distinct sense of longing in each and every character onstage. It manifests in different ways, but we’ve captured that essence through movement by taking inspiration from the text. Fitzgerald’s prose frequently references nature and the elements: earth, water, air, and fire. We’ve explored these elements and the qualities they possess: in the gaze, in the body. The motif we keep coming back to is waves in the ocean, how longing ebbs and flows like the tide. We can’t wait for you to feel it in motion.
- What is the best response you have had from an audience member?
Perhaps counterintuitively, my favourite feedback from audiences is when they don’t realise that half of the scenes we’ve written simply don’t exist in the book. It tells me that all of our hard work crafting the show, preserving Fitzgerald’s writing and shifting it in our own direction has been worth it entirely, that we did it successfully.
Adapting well-known novels always proves challenging: people want to see a story they already know and love so deeply. We wanted to strike a balance between the iconic quotes and events of the book, and give audiences something fresh to sink their teeth into. We’ve added scenes, fleshed out characters, and spun the book’s intricate web into a whole new beast for the stage while paying homage to the original novel.
To find out more about Scar Theatre as a company, head over to our website: https://scartheatreco.wixsite.com/scartheatre