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Some novels seem to cling, elusively, to the page whenever screen or stage adaptations are in the wind. F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is one of them. Northern Ballet's artistic director, David Nixon, never claims his recently premiered version is the exact chapter and verse of the original so – and this might cause Fitzgerald aficionados to tut and frown – what he delivers is as much an overview of 1920s New York, and its leisured pleasure-seeking rich folk, as it is a portrait of a self-made man, Gatsby, whose tragic flaw is his obsessive yearning for a lost love, Daisy.
That she's now married (to Tom ) and a mother is totally sidelined by his need to reclaim her: one man's happy ending will inevitably become another's sad demise.
In choreographic terms, this offers Nixon a rich variety of relationship duets – everything from the heated couplings of Tom and his mistress Myrtle to the tender re-awakening of love's young dream when Gatsby (Tobias Batley) and Daisy (Martha Leebolt) reconnect – as well as some cleverly differentiated ensembles that shimmy, razzle, charleston and tango as if life for these privileged society folk was just one long frivolous party. There's a constant thrum of selfishly-driven desires here, accentuated by the music (sourced from the works of Richard Rodney Bennett), but there's also a poignancy in the lithely adoring solo of Myrtle's husband (Benjamin Mitchell), and a wistful innocence in the episodes that recollect Gatsby and Daisy's teenage courtship. If Nixon's choreography has subtlety and wit, so too does his costume design and Jerome Caplan's set which slip-slides cinematically from elegant interior to airy outdoors.
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