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Eight Hour Play Coming to West End

Thursday 9th February 2012

A new eight hour long play is coming to the West End in June.

The Great Gatsby is played out word for word in the stage production 'Gatz', which has already been a success in the US, Australia and Singapore.

"We've always had an interest in creating shows that weren't meant for the theatre," said John Collins, director of New York-based theatre company Elevator Repair Service, who first had the idea for the Gatz in the late 90s. "We thought late-90s New York resembled late-20s New York – reckless exuberance and new wealth. But I also got interested in the problem of putting a novel on-stage and I didn't want to bring in a playwright to recraft it because the writing seemed perfect to me."

Here in the Capital,  it will be part of the London International Festival of Theatre.

The play is set in a drab office where the main character, Nick, finds a copy of The Great Gatsby and as he reads it his colleagues slowly turn into Fitzgerald's characters.

The performance will start at 2pm and finish at 10pm with a 90-minute break for dinner.

"The most commitment is in the first 30 minutes, because that's when we're asking people to slow down their clocks a little bit," said Collins. "Once they do that there's a huge reward in getting to the last chapter, which is where some of the most beautiful writing is."

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