Edinburgh International Festival: : What happens when you take every piece of dialogue from a famous Hemmingway novel and put it on the stage?

Published on Friday 26 March 2010 18:23

ANYONE addicted to the frenetic pace of the festival should be grateful New York's Elevator Repair Service is bringing only the third part of its trilogy of novel adaptations to Edinburgh and not the first. That show, a staging of The Great Gatsby, retitled Gatz, lasted a full six-and-a-half hours.

The reason for such length? The company performed every last word of F Scott Fitzgerald's 1920s classic. It took a long time but was, said the New York Times, "thrillingly theatrical and moving".

By comparison, the company's version of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is modest in ambition, although extreme by the standards of most adaptations. Having been beguiled by Hemingway's dialogue, director John Collins is fashioning a show that relies on the book's conversational exchanges alone. He has cut out the author's prose – all those descriptions of Parisian caf society and Spanish bullfights – and charged his company with the task of making sense of the rest.

"I like to have some problem to solve when we start working," says Collins, who also adapted the notoriously complex opening chapter of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. "After we read The Sun Also Rises out loud, we were so taken by the dialogue that we started to see what it sounded like with just the dialogue. The production will be an experience of this gem of dialogue we found inside the novel and that makes for great theatre just exactly as it is."

You can see why he made the decision. Hemingway's first novel has an unusually high amount of dialogue and, although much of it appears breezy and inconsequential, it communicates vast amounts about the characters. The pivotal figure is Jake Barnes, an American foreign reporter based in Paris, who enjoys the hard-drinking life of the moneyed ex-pat set of the 1920s. Finishing work for the summer, he sets off with a party of friends for a fishing trip to Spain followed by bullfights and fiesta. All the while, he cannot escape the magnetism of Lady Brett Astley, a voracious British aristo with a habit of breaking hearts.

"He does a brilliant job at having people talk in very elliptical ways about the things that are most central to the emotional story of the book," says Collins. "For something that has such brilliant dialogue, it tends to be about what's not being said. That's a very exciting, sophisticated and evocative way of telling a story."

Collins is committed not to add anything to the words Hemingway wrote, challenging himself to make theatre out of something that was never intended for the stage, an approach common to all his work. He hesitates to use the word "adaptation" because it suggests the conventional process of writing and editing a script for a rep theatre rather than his company's less predictable rehearsal-room explorations.

His background as a sound designer for the Wooster Group, the Big Apple experimenters, gives a few pointers about his work with the Elevator Repair Service since its foundation in 1991.

"We share people in common – including me, I worked for the Wooster Group for about 15 years – and I don't think anyone has influenced me more than Liz has," he says, referring to artistic director Elizabeth LeCompte. "That said, our work is pretty different. The important thing I learned working with Liz is she has such incredible courage in creating visual work and she gives herself a kind of freedom that many theatre-makers don't allow themselves. She allows herself to work outside of the conventional process, in fact, outside process altogether. That is something I have tried to take on. When ERS makes a new piece we try to start over, we essentially develop a new process each time."

As it happens, the process the company has settled on for The Sun Also Rises means it is closer to a more conventional adaptation. "Having done so much work on The Great Gatsby, where we did do every word – and the kind of problems it presents that you have to solve – I actually do want to give myself the job of distilling the Hemingway text into a two-hour performance. The challenge for us now is to preserve as much as we can of the character of Jake Barnes, the narrator. Humour is a big part of it. That's what's drawn us to these three novels from that period in American literature when there was a shift going on in modernism. There's a dry humour in the language that comes to life beautifully when you speak it aloud."

&#149 The Sun Also Rises is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, 14-17 August.

&#149 Supported by Edinburgh International Festival Benefactors and the Director's Circle. With additional support from the Embassy of the United States of America, London.