Gatz

2026 Adelaide Festival review

Gatz

At Her Majesty’s Theatre

Until March 15

Texts have driven the 2026 Adelaide Festival’s very strong theatre program this year.

Gatz is the extreme example as well as the finale. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short novel, The Great Gatsby, has been delivered in an 8-hour marathon by New York’s Elevator Repair Service. All 47,000 words.

It winds up what has turned into an unusually themed theatre program. The year that saw the cancellation of Adelaide Writers Week has been the year of literature as theatre.

We have had the transcripts of Mary, Queen of Scott’s letters delivered at incredible speed by Isabelle Huppert, in Mary Said What She Said. We have seen Edouard Louis’ book, History of Violence, in Tomas Ostermeier’s remarkable adaptation for the Schaubuhne Berlin. We have seen three famous and dark fairytales by Wilde, Andersen and Brothers Grimm turned into three retellings by Australian authors, and then adapted to theatre as A Concise Compendium of Wonders.

In Works and Days, from Belgium’s FC Bergman, 828 lines of dactylic hexameter by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod are delivered mute as actions.

Everywhere, text appears to be a driving force.

In Perle Noire: A Meditation on Josephine, songs performed by Josephine Baker have been both sung but also turned back to spoken text by Julia Bullock.

It now occurs to me that even in POV, the point of the production was to deliver text by various means to be portrayed by actors who had never seen it until they were standing on stage reading and performing it before the audience.

And while the Musica Viva concert, Die Winterreise, staged during the Festival was not part of the event, it is Schubert’s setting for 24 of Wilhelm Muller’s poems. Even Pygmalion Ensemble’s Orfeo traces its original text to Ovid and Virgil.

As we reach the end of the Festival it is obvious that I am now seeing everything through the lens of the texts that brought them to pass.

So having been softened up for an entire day of listening to the complete text of The Great Gatsby, what can I conclude?

An essayist, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a few pieces for New Yorker, the magazine which celebrated its centenary last year, as did The Great Gatsby. The two share a lot in terms of an ironic and humorous style headed towards flippancy, employed to observe the goings on in New York and commonly delivered from the viewpoint of the first person – “I” and “we” rather than “they”.

Elevator Repair Service, the New York-based ensemble which has created this work, makes it redolent with those qualities. The text has been brought to the theatre and made an entertainment by seeking out the insights and humour in the book and amplifying them in stagecraft.

The eight hours of theatre, amounting to six and half hours of performance, pass more or less unnoticed as we experience a living and breathing version of the book.

It’s a book I didn’t much like, and which has consistently failed many adaptations. ERS has concluded that it is the language of the book itself which is the treasure and has refused to pass up on any of it.

The setting is a drab office of the 1980s, judging by the furnishings, the mailout activities and the jumbled mess of storage, typewriters and early computers.

There are windows into reception and passageways set further upstage, and lighting emphasises where the action is taking place.

A worker comes in, fires up his computer, which refuses to work. So he picks up the book and begins to read aloud, and it is as though that moment sets off an unstoppable momentum.

The office fills for the day, the worker reads in an understated New York accent, and the staff gradually sensitise to the flow of the narrative.

The stage magic begins when his co-workers take to subtle actions that extend the words of the book, and then begin to deliver a fragment or two of its conversation.

The reader begins to morph into Nick Caraway, the innocent, unattached, uninvolved witness to the world of his wealthy and mysterious Long Island neighbour, Jay Gatsby.

Characters emerge in ways so slight and momentary that we begin to appreciate the discipline and timing of the ensemble as a whole.

We soon realise that Fitzgerald might have written the book, but the cast is finding ways to flesh out the narrative and dialogue and add increasingly flagrant physical fun and drama.

It is wonderful to witness this transition in the hands of skilled actors who must somehow maintain their office jobs at the same time, without losing a beat.

We have seen lots of marathon theatre events at Adelaide Festivals but this one takes a completely original standpoint and opens up a whole new conversation about literature as theatre.

NOTE: 4 Critics has been established to review and report on the 2026 Adelaide Festival at a time of declining interest and support for the arts from the media. It includes long-standing reviewers of the arts: Tim Lloyd in theatre, Stephen Whittington in music and opera and John Neylon in the visual arts. Subscribe free on their cross-linked Substacks, listed below.

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