EXCLUSIVE: Regé-Jean Page, the swaggering Bridgerton star, is banking on starring in a new West End stage adaptation of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s doomed love story of old money and new money.
“The Great Gatsby has always been a story incredibly close to my heart, and I couldn’t be more excited about bringing this new adaptation to life in London’s West End,” Page wrote, in an exclusive statement for Deadline.
He called the version, written by Joel Horwood and Maria Aberg, “electric, glamorous, deeply romantic, utterly heartbreaking, and its profound insight into the past couldn’t be more relevant to our current tumultuous 2020s.”
Producers hope to line up a theater for the production, directed by Michael Longhurst, a former artistic chief of the Donmar Warehouse, to begin performances in the fall.
Once a West End house is confirmed, further casting can begin.
Page and Longhurst go way back. The thespian’s first professional role out of drama school was in a revival of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys that Longhurst directed at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre.
When he first read the Horwood and Aberg take on The Great Gatsby, Page said he was “struck by how it unlocked the complex nuances of the book, in ways I’d just never thought possible on stage. It digs into the white space of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original text with sharp purpose, and reveals the characters with a new vitality that feels both fresh and dangerous.”
He adds: ”I’ve been looking for the right thing to do on stage for years, and this piece’s delicate balance of spectacle and real human intimacy is something Mike [Longhurst] and I have always looked to excite and move audiences with. After we read it, we just both said: ‘My God, it’s perfect. We have to do it.’.”
Page, the star of Netflix film The Gray Man, Steven Soderbergh feature Black Bag, and upcoming romantic comedy You, Me & Tuscany, wasn’t available for me to interview directly.
Troubled times
But he graciously agreed to post a response to a request to expand on his observations that Fitzgerald’s 101 year-old novel couldn’t be more relevant to our troubled times.
“Without giving too much away,” Page composed, “one of the unique strengths of this new text is that it has as sharp an interest in the social critique of the times in F Scott Fitzgerald’s original, as it does their devastating effect on the fragile, flawed people trying to live and dream through them. I don’t think the two things can truly be separated. In all ways, this play is interested in boldly revealing the worlds behind Gatsby’s dazzling facade.”
Longhurst filled in the gaps for me, and then I re-read what Page had addressed, as set out above. I do wish that we’d actually spoken, but I can see that he did not want to be misunderstood or misinterpreted.
The director says that he was thrilled to receive a text from Page saying, “Mike, I want to be Gatsby, do you fancy it?”
As it happens, Longhurst knew that Horwood and Aberg, his wife, both writers and directors, had crafted an epic portrait of The Great Gatsby that he was excited about, and he shared it with Page who was equally impressed.
“I think this is very political. I think it’s very probing,” Longhurst commends. “I think it’s very dark. They brilliantly, essentially followed the origin story of Daisy and Gatsby from Gatsby starting life as a clam picker, all the way up to what he’s achieved. And Daisy from her sort of stifling life in old money,” and watching how they intersect with each other against the backdrop of the changing world, Longhurst submits.
“What the writers have done,” Longhurst explains, is extrapolate the themes of the novel and ensure it’s a “properly probing work” that’s “about the acquisition of wealth, and it’s about capitalism and it’s about social mobility. And I think all of these things get a really sharpened edge when Regé plays Gatsby because of his ethnicity.”
Also, says Longhurst, Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s bombastic husband, “is a white supremacist,” a point, he contends, that is sometimes sanitized in some other adaptations.
The Great Gatsby story is often seen as one of “excess and tragic love stories,” but Longhurst argues that it’s about the acquisition of money and the American dream and progress, “and who is allowed to have money and who is allowed to pull levers and how power is achieved, and that’s what the play’s authors achieve,” to such an extent, Longhurst believes, that “you can just sort of feel this society hurtling towards destruction and it’s kind of thrilling and terrifying.”
Over the period of the novel, Gatsby and Daisy survive the epic Spanish influenza pandemic, a world war, and their solution, as they hurtle, “is to party hard, as they do in Cabaret, because they’re all not looking at the bubble being about to burst,” Longhurst says.
“And I think that’s really resonant. But I think you need a properly intellectual, thrilling look at the story so that it’s not just flapper girls and fireworks,” he says with succinct reasoning.
I want to record that I wasn’t even going to make an issue of Page’s ethnicity, and Longhurst shares that the play’s writers “had written this version and we read it and we haven’t changed a word of it so far. It’s not that we have written it for Regé’s ethnicity. It’s just that when you look at that story and think about Gatsby as the new world order, which the old world order is fighting to not make space for, it becomes really, really charged. Literally the phrase ‘clam picker’ cannot not be heard in a certain way when it’s lobbed at Regé.”
The director insists that “Regé’ is fully on this and is really excited by this, but it’s been really telling that it’s not been adapted with that in mind…It’s just really charged when that happens.”
All of that makes me want to see it.
Simon Friend is producing through his Melting Pot film and production company alongside Page’s A Mighty Stranger banner.
The award-winning producer has a history of working on literary adaptations. For instance, he transferred the Crucible Theatre’s production of Life of Pi, based on Yann Martel’s bestseller, to London and New York. He has also produced stage and film productions by Florian Zeller, often from translations by Christopher Hampton. One of their collaborations, The Father, won a Best Actor Oscar for Anthony Hopkins.
Friend tells me that he was immediately struck by the “bold theatricality” of this particular version of The Great Gatsby.
He calls it a “Gatsby for the theatre, distinct from any other take on the book, and very now. Regé’s combination of effortless sophistication and intellectual rigour will make his Jay a memorable one.”
Page appeared in many classical and modern plays while studying at the prestigious Drama Centre London. Earlier, he also trained at the National Youth Theatre. I saw none of that work, but around 10 or 11 years ago, I saw him tread the boards, just the once.
And he was, showing, even then, a hint of the star quality to come, playing the role of Solanio with wit and menace in a production of The Merchant of Venice led by Jonathan Pryce as Shylock, and directed by Jonathan Munby.
Now all he needs for his stage comeback is a theater.
English (US) ·