This weekend, I sat down with Mina Moniri and Peter Todd, the co-writing/co-directing duo of a brand-spanking new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Their theatrical celebration of “love and lust in the Jazz Age” is coming this winter season to The Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone, London. From an autumnal nook in St. Hilda’s College, the rain battering the windows like some prophetic applause, we chatted all things Gatsby, the writing and rehearsal process, and the hopes and dreams for the play.
Alright, team. Let’s introduce ourselves.
PETER: Sure. Okay. My name is Peter, I am the co-writer/co-director of The Great Gatsby, coming to the Cockpit in Marylebone from the 28th of November to the 14th of December – get your tickets, be there. I am an actor, writer, director – I’m currently studying for my PhD in Chemistry at Hertford College, and I just also finished a year-long Master’s course at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in Acting.
MINA: I’m Mina – Mina Moniri. I’m also a PhD student reading Biochemistry and Neuroscience. I’m also the co-writer/co-director of Gatsby and for this iteration of the production, I am also its producer. I also work part-time as a stage manager.
Awesome. Thank you. Why did you decide to adapt The Great Gatsby in the first place?
PETER: Well–
MINA: I’m trying to remember–
PETER: The original story is that we were looking to put on a classic and see if we could put our own little spin on it—come up with an interesting twist on something that everyone knows. I think it’s always interesting when really well-known pieces of literature are adapted for different media, and when there are different angles to explore things from. Today, more than ever, I think we question where things have come from and where they could go.
MINA: We didn’t want to do a classic for the sake of doing a classic. We wanted to make sure we were doing something where we had something new to say. When we were looking at things that we knew, novels that we liked, The Great Gatsby came up. There is a general queer reading of Gatsby anyway, I mean that’s not the way we’ve done it, but— Peter, do you want to explain?
PETER: Yeah, so, Nick. Nick is often perceived by audiences as being queer because of his infatuation with Gatsby, who in most iterations is a man. He also has this amazing interaction with Chester in the book which always gets forgotten about, for whatever reason, so we’ve included that. For our twist on the original, Gatsby is a woman. It not only queers the central love story between Gatsby and Daisy, but it also adds a lot of depth to other motifs running through the play; it does this really interesting warping of the story in that the green light, usually symbolic of the American Dream in most interpretations of the novel, now becomes a call for equality. This includes queer equality, racial justice and–
MINA: That’s the other thing. Besides making Gatsby a woman, we also decided to explore some of the other characters like Myrtle and George whose roles, although they aren’t huge in the book, we have expanded to start to question the weird, racist issues that do come up but have never really been questioned in any other adaptations. So, those are the two main things we have changed and the reason we wanted to put on the show.
What is the most striking thing about this adaptation of the text?
MINA: This adaptation?
Yep. And striking as the way in.
MINA: Ooh. Okay.
PETER: I think the thing that really resonates with me is the sense of longing that is imbued in every single character, every single relationship, that you see on stage. The work we have done movement-wise to try and capture that essence will be really beautiful on stage. The text itself has lots of references to nature, very elemental things: earth, water, air. So when we’ve been putting together the show, and devising the movement language for the piece, we’ve worked a lot exploring the elements in terms of the qualities they have, in the gaze, in the body, the sort of movement that they possess. The motif we keep coming back to is longing like waves in the ocean, how longing ebbs and flows like the tide.
MINA: It’s a very movement heavy show, so I think in terms of ‘striking’: people think of Gatsby as being very opulent, but for our adaptation the set is really minimal.We’ve focused a lot more on the movement language of the piece and I think that’s something that people will find quite striking.
Arguably the gender-bending of the character of Gatsby is one of the largest departures from the original text. Apart from this changing the sexual orientation of the protagonist and implications of this, what has been the most exciting thing regarding the text from a new gendered angle?
MINA: For me, the answer lies in the power dynamics that now play out on stage. There are so many examples of pioneering women in this era—a proto-feminist era. I think having a woman in the social role that Gatsby has, seeing her be a beacon of what could happen in the future, is something really powerful to have on stage.
PETER: It also makes a lot of Gatsby’s poetic language more loaded; there’s a lot of double-speak in her lines and her intelligence is really striking. Especially when you see her facing off with Tom, this big brute of a man, and she’s there, holding her own, not batting an eyelid.
Which Gatsby character do you most resonate with and why?
MINA: Resonate? I hate literally everyone in this play.
PETER: They’re all sort of terrible in their own way.
MINA: You shouldn’t resonate with anyone.
PETER: But they’re all people that you recognise.
MINA: Wait, I think we should answer for each other.
Pause.
PETER: You are not going to like my answer. I’m going to say Nick.
MINA: Really? Why?
PETER: I just think you have a detailed mindset. You’ve got a very logistical brain and–
MINA: Why didn’t you think I was going to like it? Nick is fine.
PETER: He’s annoying.
MINA: Right. For you, I know you really like Myrtle, but I don’t think Myrtle’s you, though.
PETER: Myrtle is my favourite character.
MINA: But I would say Jordan.
How was the writing process?
MINA: We basically split the book in half. Peter wrote the first half and I wrote the second. That’s not how the acts came about, but page number-wise that’s how we did it. And then we edited the hell out of it.
PETER: It was a really collaborative process, because at the time we wrote the original script, we were under a lot of time pressure so we just had to get it done. But since then, it’s been a lot of reworking, refining, cutting – it’s now down to two hours including a fifteen minute interval. We’ve decimated it. We had to be brutal.
MINA: I thought it was quite fun. It was stressful, I agree, but I really enjoyed it. It truly is a product of both of us. You can tell it really flows because we both had such a say in each part.
PETER: What’s really fun are the scenes that we’ve added that don’t exist in the original. And based on the feedback we’ve got, lots of people forget that—
MINA: –that these weren’t in the original—
PETER: Yeah, completely. It’s really cool. It’s so exciting.
What was the most important thing that you wanted to keep from the original text?
MINA: We wanted to keep so much but we couldn’t –
PETER: There are so many quotes that I wish we could keep because the book is just so beautifully written and it’s been really hard to choose the ones to let go of.
MINA: I’m trying to think of some quotes that we wanted to keep. Ooh, ‘her voice is full of money’, that’s one of my favourites.
PETER: A lot of my favourites come from the early-on Nick narration, like ‘I felt that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again’. That’s just such a universal experience. My other favourite is Gatsby’s narration of the first time she met and fell in love with Daisy: ‘like a tuning fork that had been struck upon a star’.
MINA: ‘Romping like the mind of God’ too. Ugh.
Was there anything you were looking forward to departing from in the original?
PETER: What you can expect is the usual glitz, glamour, pzazz that comes from the Roaring Twenties. Some of the work we’ve done with music is really interesting—we’ve taken music from a wide range of sources, from pop, to eighties rock, to Debussy, and we’ve woven them together into an intricate, jazzy score. I think the thing I’m really excited about is for people to rediscover and fall in love with Gatsby all over again.
MINA: I’m not sure we have departed from anything too drastically. People will watch it and be able to say “Yeah, that’s The Great Gatsby”. It’s familiar, it just has some additions that we think will really enhance the story, and doesn’t take anything away.
PETER: Just some extra layers woven in that will bring a little more magic.
The Great Gatsby is running from 28th November from the 14th December at the Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone, produced by emerging theatre company Scar Theatre with a company primarily made up of University of Oxford students and recent graduates. Please find a link to tickets below:
https://www.thecockpit.org.uk/show/the_great_gatsby
This interview has been edited for clarity.
