Status: 04/09/2023 06:00 a.m
Oliver Sturm is currently producing the first radio play of the American literary classic “The Great Gatsby”. The premiere on NDR Kultur is planned for Pentecost. In an interview, the director reveals in advance what radio play fans can look forward to.
He is one of the greatest classics of American literature and known to a wide audience in the film adaptation with Leonardo di Caprio as Gatsby who fell in love. NDR has now also produced the legendary novel from the “Roaring Twenties” as a radio play. Someone is fighting blindly for a past love, pimping his ego with ostentatious wealth, throwing opulent, lavish dance and event parties: And all this just to win back a woman who is now very richly married and left him ages ago. At the time, he didn’t think he was wealthy enough. Now he is. But can love be bought or acquired? Can you bring back past and lost time? It’s the 1920s: a time of great upheaval, decadence, debauchery, it’s the time of jazz. All of this is staged by Oliver Sturm in an opulent, colorful and moving drama about a man who, in his drunken love struggle, also drags others down with him.
Mr. Sturm, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a story 100 years ago that still moves you so much today that you are currently making a radio play about it. What moves you about the story of Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby?
F. Scott Fitzgerald began work on The Great Gatsby in 1923. The novel was first published in 1925.
Oliver Sturm: Two aspects of the novel touch me personally. On the one hand it is this clinging to an illusion of one’s own life and not being able to let go of it. On the other hand, there is the idea of the possibility of creating personal happiness in life, the idea of modeling life against one’s own social background and being able to reinvent oneself. The latter is what makes the material so specifically American. “The Great Gatsby” is considered ‘the great American novel’, which means the feasibility of social advancement and happiness in life. “The pursuit of happiness” is at the forefront of the American Constitution. The character of the multi-millionaire Jay Gatsby is an invention of the farmer’s son James Gatz, who one day decides to leave his social background behind and start a new life in splendor and wealth as Mr. Gatsby – and a lot of misfortune can result from it.
Daisy Buchanan, the girl from a better family whom he falls in love with before World War I, is his promise of happiness, so to speak: upper class and something like the Eros of upward mobility. When Gatsby returns after the war, he wants, no, has to continue this love story, even though Daisy is now married. It is not only love that drives him, but the fulfillment of an ideal of a better life at the price of selling his soul. F. Scott Fitzgerald processes a personal biographical experience here, two insults that follow one another in quick succession: his first great love, Ginevra King, rejected him because he did not correspond to her social status, and Zelda Sayre, his later wife, initially put him off and waited to see how successful the sale of his first novel would be. A theme that Fitzgerald varies in many of his short stories. Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby embody aspects of their author: Nick is his small-town better self, so to speak, and Gatsby is his unhappy, Faustian new self.
They take the listener back to the 1920s in the fictional city of West Egg in the US state of New York. How do you manage to acoustically overcome such a large spatial and temporal distance? What atmospheric sounds can we look forward to?
Economic boom in the USA in the 1920s: hustle and bustle, heavy machinery, goods transport. Oliver Sturm takes up the “Roaring Twenties” acoustically in his radio play.
Oliver Sturm: My production will make it audible that the action takes place in the 1920s, with the entire acoustic arsenal of old telephones, elevators and trains. And at the same time I want it to sound contemporary and up-to-date. Sabine Worthmann has composed music that, on the one hand, works with elements of popular music from the 1920s – the Charleston that the listeners are waiting for will come, I promise. And on the other hand, a completely different level of music sounds that is completely contemporary, music that tells of social tensions and the dangers of the soul. Our production works with such layers. Many of the sounds will sound historical, such as the cars and the doors. But we are not doing acoustic history here. It’s all about echoes and associations.
That would really be a topic in itself, to think about the changing sound design of the historical epochs. How different the world must have sounded around 1900! I’m the only one on our production team who, as a child, experienced the roar of a black steam engine pulling into the station and stood in its steam. But it’s not about historical reconstruction, it’s about connections between the ‘jazz age’ of the 1920s and our 1920s.
The story tells of the love madness of Jay Gatsby, who creates a world that aims to impress the love of his life, to win her over through material means. Do you think that this form of intensive courtship and love (still) exists in times of speed dating and short-lived relationships?
At work in the Rothenbaum studio: Oliver Sturm with the actors Michael Rotschopf and Matthias Bundschuh.
Oliver Sturm: I see parallels to the present in Gatsby’s idea of the manufacturability of one’s own happiness in life. A sociologist like Hartmut Rosa would call it the attitude of all-encompassing ‘availability’: to constantly optimize one’s own life and loved ones through self-control, proper nutrition, sport, mindfulness, self-optimization, increased efficiency and control over all parameters of being – as it is, for example, in expresses the ‘quantified self movement’.
Another parallel to the present is the emptiness and melancholy amidst the wealth, the absence of meaning in a saturated and materially secure world. However, happiness arises precisely from moments of the ‘unavailable’, of the unplannable, uncontrollable. Speed dating and short-lived relationships are testament to this drive to uncover the unavailable in love and always seek better. At the same time, and fortunately, humans aren’t easily optimized, and intense courtship and longing will not die out. Jay Gatsby’s seeming rationality in pursuing his own path collides with his utter irrationality in attempting to restore a first love’s past exactly as it once was. is that romantic In any case, it is deeply illusory.
You had Matthias Bundschuh speak for “Nick Carraway” and Michael Rotschopf for “Jay Gatsby”. How did the two find their roles? Were there any surprises?
With Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, the British director Jay Clayton filmed the romantic drama from the “Roaring Twenties” in 1974.
Oliver Sturm: As I said, the characters Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby embody two aspects of their author Fitzgerald’s life: in Nick he describes his longing for purity and sincerity, in Gatsby the illusion of being able to create an ideal of life. Matthias Bundschuh, who acts as both narrator and scenic character at the same time, is the perfect observer for me with his cleverness and linguistic sensitivity. In his voice we hear Nick’s restraint and discretion while at the same time openness in perception. It is the perspective of the Middle-West small-town dweller who looks at the materialism of New York’s amusement society, even with its ironic detachment.
Gatsby, who constantly pretends to be someone other than who he is, has created a protective armor of perfect manners and absurd politeness. His relationship to the world is that of a permanent semi-distance because he has something to hide. Michael Rotschopf plays this precarious existence in its purest form and exploits the scope and the iridescence between the real and the false self. – Surprises? Lots of them, especially the ones with which all the actors came to the studio with joy in playing and then pushed and hyped each other up. It was pure joy to experience that.
In the novel, Fitzgerald uses a lot of hints, so the characters remain shadowy, appearing to the reader as shadows of themselves. This “shadowy” aspect is missing in the films, which may also be due to the fact that writing offers other possibilities for stimulating the imagination than moving images. How do you deal with that in the radio play?
The US production of The Great Gatsby (original title) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton was released in 2013 and directed by the Australian Baz Luhrmann.
Oliver Sturm: You formulate that quite aptly: the superiority and other possibilities of language in radio plays. Fitzgerald’s linguistic sketches and the abundance of hints create a depth that – unlike the film – goes far beyond mere illustration. His narrative language takes the scenic dialogues to another level. On the other hand, Fitzgerald also works very consciously with flattening and emphasis. The secondary characters are often caricatures and ridiculous cardboard figures, typifications as if from a commedia dell’arte. It was great fun capturing these characters as well, such as Mr. Owl, played by Josef Ostendorf, who has been drunk for a week, or the involuntarily funny Myrtle, who tries to save herself from her social dance of death through her relationship with Daisy’s husband, played by Birgit Minichmayr, or the dumb Tom Buchanan, in the embodiment of Marc Hosemann (how appropriate: at the moment as a supermarket branch manager in “Die Discounter”). From the many secondary characters – we had 32 actors* for 40 roles – a very complex social hidden object emerges.
The conversation was conducted by Jennifer Philipp.
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