F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. First published in 1925, it was criticised for debauched themes and first world war references, only garnering accolades after Fitzgerald died in 1940. It has since been adapted into numerous stage and radio plays, musicals, ballet and two high-profile films.
It’s a complex and large-scale work and Queensland Theatre Company has opened its 2026 season with a bold, contemporary and minimalist version in a first-time collaboration with Shake & Stir Theatre Co.
Adapting any great work of historical literature to lend relevance and context to our time and place is no mean feat. Skilfully adapted by Daniel Evans and Nelle Lee and co-directed by Daniel Evans and Nick Skubij, the creative team has stayed relatively faithful to the novel, its text and characters, providing a slick and fast-moving production that glides smoothly from scene to scene.
The Great Gatsby review – quick links
Revisiting Long Island
The unfolding drama is seen through the memory and illusions of the narrator and protagonist Nick Carraway. A struggling writer who has returned from the war, he rents a small cottage near a rich neighbour, Jay Gatsby, on Long Island. Across the bay lives his cousin, Daisy, married to Tom Buchanan.
Ryan Hodson is excellent as Nick, giving a first-rate, believable performance as the observer and commentator on the characters he encounters. He is both scandalised and entranced by what he sees and hears in equal measure. He falls half in love with the golfer Jordan Baker, while his growing admiration for the enigmatic Gatsby is genuine, remaining a loyal friend to the end. He is haunted by his memories of the war, and these episodes are truthfully realised by Hodson.
On opening night, the pace seemed overly fast and, performers being miked, the volume was also loud. Revisiting this would help an appreciation of the cast’s universally excellent New York accents.
ArtsHub: The Great Gatsby debuts in Toowoomba
In the novel, the many settings are described in rich lyrical prose, from the ultra-rich houses at both East and West Egg on Long Island to the grimy Valley of Ashes en route to New York, and the wild bacchanalian party scenes at Gatsby’s house. Here, they are recreated with simple but effective staging by Christina Smith.
Various apartments and rooms, represented by manually moved trucks, are neatly enclosed with black cloths, offering images of a claustrophobic illusionary world. The hedonistic party scenes with free-flowing alcohol and glittering, shiny curtains are well depicted and extravagantly costumed.
Trent Suidgeest’s lighting design sees scenes lit in a range of both lurid colours and contrasting black and white, representing the abstract impressions of the narrator’s memories. Guy Webster provides a mostly jazz-fuelled soundtrack, often with nods to contemporary lyrical sounds that add to the drama, while the choreography of Nerida Matthaei injects the frenzied jazz era dancing with modern well-integrated movements.
Charisma, criminality and ‘careless people’ in The Great Gatsby
One of modern literature’s most fascinating and complex characters, Jay Gatsby is by turns elusive, charming, obsessive and dishonest. While not necessarily a flamboyant character, Gatsby’s reason for being is his passionate devotion to Daisy, but Shiv Palekar’s early appearances in act one are decidedly low-key, giving few clues to Gatsby’s character.
Later in the play he displays an almost puppy-like devotion to Daisy in the amusing scenes set in Nick’s cottage. He also fights back credibly against Tom in a major argument over Daisy. But Nick’s imagined staged re-enactment of five years earlier, when Gatsby first met and fell in love with Daisy, displays surprisingly little depth of emotion. Much-needed sparkle and charisma in his character seems sadly lacking, as well as the requisite steeliness of an obvious criminal.
Daisy is delightfully played by Jess Vickers. She offers a finely crafted melange of emotions as the spoilt socialite, wounded by her husband’s infidelities. Fragile and vulnerable, she ultimately shows her shallow and cynical nature as she toys with Gatsby’s emotions.
Jeremiah Wray gives us a Tom who is every bit the rich, brutish and entitled adulterer and racist. In a masterful performance by Wray, his treatment of Myrtle and his wife makes him sickeningly unlikable. Nick’s comments that Tom and Daisy are ‘careless people’ rings sadly true.
Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, is played coquettishly and with great verve by Nelle Lee, while Loren Hunter provides some terrific period music and songs linking scenes that add to Nick’s memories.
Representing the social revolution that was happening in the 1920s, Libby Munro’s Jordan Baker is a modern, promiscuous woman with short hair and masculine clothes. With some of the best humorous lines in the play, she gives a sterling performance full of bravado and tongue-in-cheek irony, impressing the naïve Nick. Smaller roles and the ensemble cast are universally good.
All for the better, this is no saccharine Broadway version celebrating the swinging 1920s, when Prohibition alongside social and political tensions were at their height. Rather it is a heartfelt examination of the human condition with all its inadequacies and foibles.
Exploring social norms and class inequality, moral decadence and excess, and love and sex in equal measure, this Queensland Theatre Company and Shake & Stir production of The Great Gatsby offers Fitzgerald’s disturbing view of our world. The disintegration of the American dream, if it ever existed, is clearly as relevant today as it was back in the 1920s.
