Adelaide Festival. Elevator Repair Service, USA. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 13 Mar 2026

 

“Treat the novel as a novel and don’t try to make it into a play.”

 

That, America’s Elevator Repair Service decided while experimenting with ways to stage The Great Gatsby. And therein lies the secret of what we now see as Gatz: not an “adaptation” so much as a staged reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, performed in full.

 

It is epic: eight hours, six of them solid words. In production for two decades and seen around the world, it arrives at the Adelaide Festival as a feast of pure Americana—an absurdly brave and brilliantly original act of theatre-making laid over Fitzgerald’s unadulterated prose.

 

It is not just clever. It is brilliant. The eight hours sag only slightly as the end draws nigh and the narrative tightens to its conclusion. Yet even those moments invite us to bask in the eloquence of the writing—especially when the actor lowers the book and the language hangs, unassisted, in the air.

 

This is leap-to-your-feet ovation material: exactly what festivals are for. An exquisite example of experiential theatre, the expiring hours bonding audience, actors, and narrative in a shared act of endurance and attention. Perhaps the audience tires more than the cast, because the cast does not flag. Book in hand, Scott Shepherd carries it all.

 

The conceit is a beauty. A drab worker in a dull, anonymous office-land somewhere in New York finds a copy of The Great Gatsby on his messy desk while waiting for his IBM green-screen computer to be fixed—mid-80s, perhaps, when those early desktops were indeed engines of weary frustration. The computer is never repaired. Time, in a sense, stops. The man reads aloud to no one in particular. Gradually his colleagues take notice; the reading becomes another reality; the office workers morph into Fitzgerald’s characters—and the reader morphs too. He becomes Nick Carraway, narrator of the novel, and—crucially—ensuring not a single word is lost, he connects the dialogue with all the interim “he said” and “she gazed” conjunctions. Shepherd becomes the dramatic pivot in a performance of naturalistic impeccability. And how perfect is that name for this role: “Scott” of the author, and “Shepherd” as the one who rounds up and guides the evolving cast of characters.

 

Fitzgerald wrote his book through the 1920s, drawing loosely on his own life and times. Post–World War I America was the flapper era: the hedonistic jazz age of bootleg liquor and libertines. A Midwestern boy and Princeton graduate, Fitzgerald shifted his social imagination eastward into the orbit of Ivy League privilege and Long Island luxury. These make up the Gatsby crowd, gathered at the lavish parties of the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, whose passion is to reignite the flame he once had with the gorgeous Daisy—now married to a former Yale football star. The tale, of course, is doomed. The Great Gatsby is probably among the most universally read of novels, and it remains an irony that Fitzgerald died unaware it was fated for such success.

 

That success continues through today’s mediums—but never more vividly, perhaps, than in this trip to theatre heaven.

 

Delivering the pages word-for-word somehow heightens intensity. The affluenza of Gatsby’s world is cleverly offset by the marvellous set of office banality. There is a hint of TV’s The Office, with its battler workplace atmosphere—only here it is a design by Louisa Thompson with entrances and exits to other worlds. It is artfully embellished by actor/soundman Ben Williams, stationed in a cramped office of his own, overlaying the action with birdsong, traffic, party ambience, nocturnal insects, and occasional shattering eruptions of shock. This soundscape is a masterwork in its own right.

 

The production has clearly been forged through thwarting times and deep thinking, all of which pays off under John Collins’ deft direction. With narrator-led intermissions and a dinner break, its eight hours slither by surprisingly fast—though one must tip one’s cap to Shepherd’s seemingly tireless delivery. He is a sterling endurance player.

 

The cast is large, but physically and emotionally dominated by Jim Fletcher, who transforms from po-faced office colleague to the tragic anti-hero of the piece: the enigmatic Jay Gatsby. He has magnetic stage presence and, thanks to Colleen Werthmann’s well-considered costumes, cuts an imposing figure in a very handsome wardrobe.

 

The supporting cast members slip deftly into their dual roles and become wholly plausible as Gatsby’s circle, particularly Susie Sokol, highly simpatico as Jordan Baker. Former Melbourne actress Lucy Taylor dares to give surprising depth to vain Daisy, the object of Gatsby’s obsession. It was wonderful, too, to see our own Terence Crawford among the Elevator Repairers, delivering a moving cameo at the denouement as the patriarch Henry C. Gatz.

 

Gary Wilmes, Maggie Hoffman, Laurena Allan, Gavin Price, Frank Boyd, Vin Price, Kristen Sieh and Mike Iveson complete the company who brought this remarkable work to life at Adelaide Festival 2026.

 

Thanks to them all, and to the production staff and crew: it takes a moveable feast of skill and diligence to make art like this. The applause goes on.

 

We might have lost Writers’ Week but we seem to have gained Reader’s Theatre.

 

Samela Harris

 

When: 13 to 15 Mar

Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre

Bookings: ticketek.com.au