The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway didn’t use many adjectives, but there are several (both good and bad) to be used for this production by the Elevator Repair Service troupe from New York, the bastion of American hedonism. Bringing a Fringe spirit to the International Festival was a bold move, and they are to be commended in particular for the way the source material was brought to life, leaping out of their seats as the prose left the printed form. The tale of excess and fiesta is narrated by a Nick Carraway figure, Jake, whose delivery does reach way up high in the Lyceum, as do all the characters’. The perils of phones buzzing and shuffling among audience members, while recreating a potential reading environment, distracted me more than the inserted and overlong dance sequences which interrupted the narrative. It must be said that the set, more or less four tables, some chairs and one’s imagination, was stunningly done, and the integration of the sound desk within two bars on stage was a masterstroke as it meant the actors could both act and tech at the same time, helping the coherence of the piece. The recreation of the Pamplona bullfight has been much commented upon, and deserves to be praised. The pace of the dialogue accurately conveys the fall, and makes it a tragicomedy of the highest order.

There remain problems: in a recent interview with an Edinburgh publication, the play’s director was prepared for some things to fail. It’s not that they fail, as more or less everything succeeds (and my fatigue didn’t help any sympathy I showed towards it); it’s that the play begins in the afternoon (when I saw the matinee) and finishes around lunchtime the following day. I exaggerate, but at two hundred minutes it really is attempting to be The Great American Novel on Stage, with the requisite good pages/ parts and those that drag.
 

It remains, however a very zeitgeist-y novel both for our time and theirs (the Ailing Noughties and the Roaring Twenties united at last), with a fiesta lasting a week akin to some Fringe binge or an allegory for the financial boom and bust of the last decade. “The fiesta was over,” is the message of the play, though some audience members may substitute the word ‘play’. Good, though, still.

The Sun Also Rises
Royal Lyceum Theatre
Misc times, 14 – 17 Aug