Despite a mishap-fraught journey from Chicago to Malta that forced The Tour de Force Theatre Company to perform a dramatisation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Manoel Theatre) without the production costumes and props – all held up somewhere mysterious – and without having had a proper rest, the performance I viewed on October 29 was in most ways very professional, characterised by a zest not be expected of a company that must have been pretty tired. All in all it was very watchable.
John Berry’s unpleasant Tom is amoral, racist and hot-tempered to the point of hitting his mistress in public- Paul Xuereb
Peter Joucla, who also directs the piece, has arranged for the production to be performed by a cast of five. Four of the five, moreover, do not just have to play two or even three each, but have to sing popular songs from the 1920s arranged by Joucla, that provide brief intervals between a number of scenes and, with their occasional disharmonies symbolising the disturbing society inhabited by the play’s characters.
I found less satisfactory the minimalistic set consisting of a number of boxes painted white with a black design that were arranged and re-arranged between scenes to suggest different venues. One needs a stronger imagination than mine to accept this device as suggesting the places where most of the scenes are enacted.
The great Gatsby of the title is a young millionaire with a mysterious past and a suspicious business involvement. He has built a large mansion with huge grounds on Long Island, New York, facing across a bay the house of another wealthy man, Tom Buchanan who is married to Daisy, the girl Gatsby has always loved and failed to marry in the past because he had no money.
He uses Nick, whom he got to know when they were both soldiers in the Great War, to get in touch with her again, and manages to start an affair with her.
Tom finds out, and though he himself has a mistress, Myrtle who is married to Wilson, a petrol station owner, he is furious and has a heated encounter in New York with Gatsby. Here he tells everybody that Gatsby has made his money from the illegal practice of bootlegging. Gatsby thinks Daisy has always loved no one but him and so will desert Tom and go with him, but is dismayed to hear Daisy say she did love Tom once and makes it clear that she is reluctant to leave him even now.
The climax is reached when the contemptuous Tom somewhat improbably allows Daisy to go back to Long Island with Gatsby in his yellow Rolls Royce, the car Tom had been allowed to drive on the way out. Daisy drives the Rolls and on the way knocks down accidentally and kills Myrtle, Tom’s mistress.
Wilson, the woman’s husband, is told by Tom that the yellow car was Gatsby’s, and the man grabs a revolver, shoots Gatsby dead in his pool, thinking it was he who had knocked down Myrtle, then shoots himself.
As the play is ending, Nick, who thought Gatsby was “gorgeous… (he had) some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” – qualities that come out in the novel but certainly not in this dramatisation – is told by his friend Jordan, a friend of both Gatsby and Daisy and someone with whom Nick seems to be in love, that she is getting engaged to someone else.
Nick is not really shocked; he is eager to leave for his native California, trying to leave the miserable society of the east coast behind him, and especially people like Tom who made himself responsible for Gatsby’s shooting by Wilson when Tom himself has been Myrtle’s lover.
I found the first 15 to 20 minutes of the production a bit trying until I got used to the doubling of the various parts and the various relationships, but when I did I could relax and enjoy the spare but vivid characterisation of the various roles and the unfolding of their past histories.
The rhythms are fast but unhurried, and there are some moments when long pauses make the audience drink in the significance of what is happening or about to happen. The production’s proper costumes would have made some of the scenes brighter, more evocative of the corrupt morality of the time, but their absence did not have a substantial effect on the performance.
Andrew John Tait’s Gatsby, quiet-spoken but capable of intensity in his speech, establishes himself as the piece’s central figure. I did not quite empathise with his predicament, for the character is, and has to be, aloof to a point, but when his love and his life are destroyed I felt some of the pity evoked by characters in Greek tragedy.
His other part, Wilson – ironically, the man who kills him – is a contrast: a man who when faced with tragedy is incapable of restraining his grief and anger.
As Nick, Charles Kerson is the quiet observer, the man who says he has been taught not to pass judgement, but is accused at the end of having done just that.
Jordan (Sharlit Deyzac) accuses him of not being the honest man she first thought he was, but left me unsure of what exactly she was referring to; probably this was due to the insufficient fleshing out in the script of the two characters’ relationship. Deyzac’s other part, that of Myrtle, is sensual and faintly vulgar.
John Berry’s unpleasant Tom is amoral, racist and hot-tempered to the point of hitting his mistress in public. He also plays Woolheim, Gatsby’s very shady business associate, as sinister and greasy.
Daisy (Kathryn Duffy) is young, fun-loving and unable to take a relationship, however important, very seriously. This last characteristic comes out well in the big scene of confrontation between Tom and Gatsby.