The Great Gatsby at Wilton’s Music Hall

Peter Joucla’s stage adaption of The Great Gatsby finds its perfect setting in the stunningly atmospheric Wilton’s Music Hall, transporting audiences back to the Roaring Twenties with genuine conviction. Immersive theatre is a term bandied around a lot nowadays, utilized to cure theatre-goers fatigue with wooden and remote productions, to varying degrees of success.

Gatsby’s ill founded, romantic assertion ‘Can’t repeat the past?… Why of course you can!’ underscoring the novel‘s tragic ending, takes on renewed life the minute you step through Wilton’s charmingly dilapidated peeling wooden door.

The very walls of the building seem to exude their historical lineage, the hum of animated conversation mingling with distinctive Charleston music, audience members who had gone all out in full flapper attire and well placed mobster characters causing mischief within the crowd, all culminated in a palpable sense of excitement as people amassed in the bar and foyer.

The ever so visually appealing era truly seemed to have come alive and taken root comfortably in this enclave from the humdrum of contemporary life. Free Hendrick’s G&T’s and Charleston dancers in the interval added to this heady evocation and by the end of the night audience members were grooving to the sounds of the London Dixieland Jazz Band as though 2012 were a distant memory.

The Great Gatsby sits happily amid ‘Top Book’ lists for a reason, and I for one was dubious about its transition to the stage. My fears were compounded when the play opened with a chorus of a cappella scatting jazz singers and dancers – were we about to sit through a musical bastardised, cheesed-up version of a well loved classic?

Fortunately the chorus were used proficiently to carry the interim between scenes further conjuring the Jazz Age, and improving the flow and seamlessness of the production, and my cynical preconceptions were washed away. Hats off to choreographer Connor Bryne who powered the chorus vocally and excelled in his cameo as Wolfsheim, a sinister character in the book, who Bryne imbued with comic depths as a Chicago gangster rivalling Brando’s Godfather.

Joucla’s adapted script and the actors’ great aptitude for comic timing, had the auditorium roaring with laughter throughout the play; this injection of humour was unexpected and added another level to Fitzgerald’s timeless tale of moral corruption in a time of economic excess. The touch of light heartedness, often propelled by a buoyant Vicki Campbell as Jordan, continued to serve Fitzgerald’s purpose of social satire as we sniggered at the shortcomings between what character’s say and what they represent.

The Great Gatsby starts slow and this production worked the novel’s pace to its advantage so that when the second half sets in, successive party scenes and intimate conversations have you unconsciously utterly embroiled in the action onstage. The script omitted Nick Carraway’s guiding and morally objective narrative voice yet Nick Chambers who played this role, employed a series of quizzical expressions and aghast stances, so that by the time his cataclysmic ‘They’re a rotten crowd… you’re worth the whole goddamn bunch of them’ is belted out, we see him as the omnipresent moral yardstick and take his word for gospel.

As tensions rise exponentially to breakneck intensity in the second half critical scenes, such as the hot and claustrophobic hotel room where Gatsby declares his love, contain real bite and pertinence.

The performance should be merited for maintaining its jocosity and yet upping the game when the script called for it. The evening as a whole was thrillingly diverting and thoroughly entertaining.

The Great Gatsby is running until 19 May at:

Wilton’s Music Hall
Graces Alley
Hackney
E1 8JB