It’s almost like peeling an onion: Nick Carraway picks away layer by layer – but he doesn’t come across a core. His neighbor Jay Gatsby remains a mystery to him and to the audience of this story. It’s only late that you get a few ideas of what drives this enigmatic, elusive man.
Significant is the first night that Carraway is a guest at one of Gatsby’s lavish parties at his swaggering Long Island mansion, which Carraway overlooks from his own modest property – as a party-goer from a voyeuristic distance, if you will, who he is was before he was actually invited. The host doesn’t appear as such, and the way Carraway does eventually get to know him in person is a little embarrassing for the guest.
Most characters’ lust for life far outweighs their sense of decency.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known novel, is a tale of glamor and dazzling, greed and self-indulgence, naivety and ingratitude – judging by the people orbiting the title character. The art of this story and its author is that its center remains vague, seemingly unoccupied for so long. Oliver Sturm has now staged it for NDR as a radio play in two parts, each lasting almost an hour and a half.
Sturm doesn’t whip his production through all the intricacies of the novel’s plot, but cleverly peels out the essentials: the description of longings. He takes the time he needs. He stages the lasciviousness of the characters, their penchant for the vulgar, the obscene, their lust for life, which is far greater than their sense of decency. Sabine Worthmann’s compositions are what jazz is: a musical expression of the sexual urge.
Lost in the midst of this scenery are the staid Nick Carraway, played by Matthias Bundschuh, and the illustrious Jay Gatsby, played by Michael Rotschopf, both of whom are closer than it first appears. Because both men are in their own way more profound than the rest of the baggage. Birgit Minichmayr and Peter Lohmeyer can be heard in supporting roles. This is also what this radio play is: making the excesses of the story audible through actors who love to play.