The Great Gatsby, King’s Head - review

Even if this isn’t the most polished account of The Great Gatsby, Joe Evans's two-hour staging has both style and heart
The Great Gatsby Musical
29 May 2013

It may be an exaggeration to say that we are living in a Gatsby-mad age, but here we have the second musical version this year of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, following one at Wilton’s Music Hall in April. There’s also been the eight-hour Gatz, a scrupulous enactment of every word of the original text, and excitement is swirling around Baz Luhrmann’s new film adaptation, due out next summer.

This two-hour staging, for which Joe Evans has written both the lyrics and the music, feels compact, and in truth it’s less a full-blown musical than a play with songs. Early on there is a party atmosphere, and the allure of Fitzgerald’s prose threatens to be lost. But a surprising amount of the novel’s colour is retained, and in the later stages there’s definitely some of the author’s poetic, melancholy grandeur.

Linnie Reedman’s intimate production develops a nice sense of the menagerie of oddballs gathered round the fabled playboy Jay Gatsby. The object of his affections, Daisy Buchanan, genuinely seems “paralysed with happiness” in Matilda Sturridge’s calculatedly passive performance. Her husband Tom is given a bruising thuggishness by Steven Clarke. Peta Cornish combines languor with cynicism as the cheating golf pro Jordan Baker, and there’s some vigorous work from Naomi Bullock and Jon Gabriel Robbins.

Nick Carraway, the novel’s diffident yet perceptive narrator, is perhaps too much of a cipher here, played with discretion by Raphael Verrion, but Sean Browne’s Gatsby is suitably enigmatic, a blend of courtesy and dishonesty.

Although the chemistry between the performers is strong, the songs often don’t do enough to advance the action, and more of the dialogue should have been set to music. In addition, the tight playing space limits the possibilities of the dance scenes, choreographed by Alyssa Noble.

But Belle Mundi’s costumes are a strength. And while it’s hard to create an impression of gilded glamour in a theatre that’s swelteringly hot, the committed cast endow the production with passion as well as claustrophobia.

Even if this isn’t the most polished account of The Great Gatsby, it has both style and heart.

Until September 1 (020 7478 0160, kingsheadtheatre.org)

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