"The whole play is a crescendo", First and Final Year English Undergraduates put on 'The Great Gatsby'

"The whole play is a crescendo"

Tally (English 2023) and Mia (English 2025) are both part of an upcoming production of ‘The Great Gatsby’ at the ADC Theatre from the 17 February to 21 February. Tally is directing it, Mia is playing Daisy, and nobody knows who Gatsby is. I hear the cast were asked to sign an NDA. From marketing tactics to artistic interpretation, it’s a play rife with, and dedicated to, enigma. 

“As a director, you go a lot by feeling”, Mia says to Tally. She gave them all homework and generally approached directing the play with a balanced combination of intuition and research. This attitude seems to have distinctly shaped the atmosphere of the production, with Mia highlighting the sense of camaraderie that has developed in the team. Tally isn’t a believer in “meticulously track[ing] people”, and rather makes room for constant collaboration, “encourage[ing] people to speak up”. 

This fluidity is a backbone of the text itself, with the playscript only being split into Acts 1 and 2, with no definitive scene breaks. As a result, Tally has opted for an instinctual approach to scene transitions, following actor’s gut feelings and then using music matched to location to help signpost the movements of the play. 

This signposting though music is a core aspect of the directorial vision, with the play being chock-full of 1920s music; Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and more icons of the era all populate the score. They allow the “pulse” of the play to come to fruition, constantly allowing kinetic energy to drive the plot and actors’ performance towards the enigma, into the tension between surrealism and reality, between audience and stage. The pulse pulls the people into the spectacle and invites them to question it.

This problematisation of passivity is something Tally has brought into her academics too, working on an essay on Gatsby and restlessness. She’s taking both the Visual Culture and American Literature papers this term, so maybe that explain all the actors’ homework.

Mia and the rest of the cast have taken this drumming on of the play as a route through to the fever pitch of their characters’ enigmatic personalities and arcs. It’s a daunting process, but an exciting one, especially for her ADC Theatre debut. After all, as Mia says, “the whole play is a crescendo”.

Tickets to watch ‘The Great Gatsby’ are on sale and can be purchase via the ADC Website.

^{Header image by Dik Ng}

^{First body image by Dik Ng}

^{Final body image by Charlie Conybeare}