The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

Based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway 

By Elevator Repair Service

By Lucy Wilson

It’s rare to experience theatre these days with a cast of ten and a running time of over three hours. It’s also rare for a New York Theatre Company to stage an Ernest Hemingway novel in Hobart. Rumoured as the headline show for this Ten Days on the Island Festival, the award-winning company, Elevator Repair Service, staged The Select (The Sun Also Rises). It’s a semi-autobiographical 1920’s novel about the lost generation of post-war Brits and Americans spending decadent alcohol drenched days in Parisian cafes and visiting a famous bull fighting festival in Spain.

The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

Elevator Repair Service

Presented as part of Ten Days on the Island 

Theatre Royal

I have been enjoying rereading Ernest Hemingway lately, so I was thrilled to see ‘The Select’, a stage adaption of The Sun Also Rises, appear on the Theatre Royal programme as part of Ten Days on the Island. It never occurred to me how hard it would be to stage; for me the book was all about the internal workings of the characters’ heads. And drinking. I remember feeling like I had a hangover if I read the book before going to sleep at night, as if I too had imbibed all that champagne, and the alcohol had seeped through the pages into my bloodstream.

Well, the New York-based Elevator Repair Service (ERS) have artfully adapted the book into a play. They  have captured that feeling of self-indulgent idleness and of characters with all the time and liberty in the world to drink and wallow in their own shallowness.

If ever a writer owned a classic aptonym it must be dear Mr Hemingway because, like his name, his writing is exceedingly earnest, and this book is no exception. I wonder what he would have made of the slapstick humour in this adaption, and the manner in which his characters became caricatures. I hope he would have approved. Hemingway made so many unmercifully caustic observations of human nature, so it was a relief to enjoy these observations as satire as well as social comment. And the delivery was no less powerful for the change.

The ERS company was bold and true in not shying away from the revoltingly anti-Semitic nature of Hemingway’s dialogue. Robert Cohn's character was irksome and pathetic, but his Jewishness was neither here nor there. If it had have been written out of the play, it would not have detracted from the story, and this may have been the sensitive thing to do. The play was set and written in the heady days in Europe between two world wars and its main characters, especially Jake, were damaged by the first of those wars. Hemingway had been scarred by his wartime experiences too, so it was galling to hear the openly normalised prejudice against Cohn. We in the audience had the benefit of knowing what horrors the Second World War had yet to unleash on Jewish people, and this heightened my discomfort in quite liking the largely unlikeable people.

The production was impeccable and captivating and the sound was inspired and cheeky. To have two lead actors double as Foley artists on stage showed the company respected the maturity of the audience enough to have fun with them, not just serve it up to them. The set was sparse and sophisticated – I love a set that has little fussing around and I have never seen so many uses for a trestle table! They managed to cram a whole fiesta, a bull fighting arena and many streets of Paris cafes onto one modest stage.

The soundtrack was a melange of vintage Paris jazz and contemporary funky New York hip-hop which allowed the racy choreography to take over the narrative from the dialogue. The story kept flowing seamlessly.

And the cast just nailed it. Every single actor on stage was sexy and speedy and authentic. Brave and brilliant. (It must have had an effect on me because I seem to using a lot of short, assertive sentences!)

The final scenes were awkward, but I also remember feeling that way about the book. How else could Hemingway wrap up his story after the carnage to the psyche wrought by excessive drinking, utter directionless, cruel friends and dysfunctional relationships? It was never going to be a happy ending. But it was a dammed fine production chaps.

By Stephenie Cahalan

The Select (the Sun also Rises )

Cleverly playing with form to reveal the content 

by Gai Anderson

Based on the play by Earnest Hemingway

Performed by Elevator Repair Service

Seen at the Theatre Royal Hobart, as part of Ten Days on the Island, March  2013

In these days of enthrallment with film as the ultimate form in which classic stories are enacted dramatically, transforming a classic 20^th century American novel to stage engagingly is quite a feat. But that’s what New York’s experimental theatre company Elevator Repair Service (ERS) like to do. They take the content of existing American literary forms – TV programs, non fiction writing, novels, plays etc., and then play with the form of enactment: mashing them up, juxtaposing theatrical styles, using slapstick, comedy and their highly developed abstract choreography.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is the third of a trilogy of American classic novels, which included a 7-hour version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby where every word of the novel was spoken onstage. It’s the text that keeps it grounded and allows them to experiment with the form, apparently. 

In the case of The Select (The Sun Also Rises ) they say they found a play inside the novel – and the show is essentially narrator-led storytelling, (“ she said”, “I said”) interspersed with heightened clipped moments of interaction - feeling at times like a noir-film as radio-play, and at others a Pinteresque drawing room drama crossed with a comic strip. 

While the action is not boring, at 3 + hours, its words demand considerable focus at times particularly in the slower first act, as the narrator sets up the lives of a group of lost and damaged, post-war bohemian expats, endlessly trying to fill their vacuous lives with excessive drinking and partying in Paris bars. And there is the rub I guess - these are not pleasant people to be watching up close, and perhaps why I have never really warmed to Hemingway’s novels.

But there is also much fun, as the lush wood-paneled bar room set transforms simply into taxi, streetscape and bedroom with clever light and sound. The satire that really drives this stylish show is held by a deliciously heightened soundtrack feeding the staccato slapstick action. Sound effects of endless breaking glasses, pouring wine and laughter - coupled with surreal moments of abstracted dance and movement, a waiter who constantly juggles wine bottles and a continuous revolving  chorus of colorful local characters.

 

But in the second act, as the action moves to Spain and what is now a love-octet becomes ridiculous and painfully tragic, the pace really picks up and the real brilliance of ERS is revealed.  Set amongst the color of the bullfight and fiesta of Pamplona, the contrast between the desperate vacuous white characters, the passionate Spanish and their adulated toreadors is extreme. Here Hemingway’s message is cleverly exaggerated through the choruses of endless sculling of alcohol, and the Ren and Stimpy version of the young man Toreador (played by a woman) bull-fighting with a table sans-horns. It is silly in the extreme against the mashed up sounds of bad matriarchy-band music but totally and hypnotically brilliant.

In the end whilst I’m still not sure about the 3+ hours, I definitely got something of the genius of Hemingway - as the desperate-for-passion, tragic white-woman, destroying the men around her, is paralleled with the desperate-for-tragedy as passion of the Spanish and their blood-thirsty bullfighting .

I might even try some of Hemingways novels again, but will definitely try ERS , again should I get the chance.