Review: The Sun Also Rises (The Select), Lyceum Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

The Elevator Repair Service haven’t so much adapted Hemingway’s first novel of note into a play as plonked it onstage as is. For much of the four hours, they are faithful to the last full-stop, such that we learn – to borrow the retort to Method Acting – precisely what the characters had for breakfast each morning.

Such idle details might be fine when dreamily leafing through pages, passing your own time, but onstage, they tend against the streamlined nature of drama. Occasionally, the company utilize the messy transition from page to stage, exploding the text into unruliness. So, we get sudden bursts of vivacious hip-swinging choreography repeating itself as if Hemingway’s fiestas have been sampled and looped. When it does so, we get flashes of virtuosity. The novel bursts its banks and its heart and soul spill out. There’s a reluctance to detonate, however, which leaves the whole thing caught in the middle: either two hours to long or two hours too short.

Here, Hemingway’s novel plays out beneath the bottle-lined shelves of The Select bar. It’s tables, which later sprout horns and charge at matadors, are littered with glasses, all half-full or half-empty or, much like the characters themselves, half-drunk and half-finished. We follow Jake Barnes (Mike Iveson) and his disillusioned companions as they lollop around Europe, fishing and fighting and fuelling themselves with alcohol, en route to the Pamplona festival and its daily bullfights. In their midst, casting spells and melting hearts, is Brett Ashley, almost an antidote to Holly Golightly, who, in Lucy Taylor’s hands, seems entirely drained of colour. Her gamine magnetism stems from a desert dryness. Those enraptured by her are parched, desperately trying to quench the unquenchable.

Once you’ve settled into the pace, which draws out the longueurs of sobriety into slow drawls, things become more imaginative. Life looks and sounds better when under the influence. The lights soften the pallor and glint off bottles. Sound dislocates: bottles glug-glug-glug as they pour, glass smashes as tumblers tumble. Nothing is quite real, until – in the dying moments – Iveson’s Jake works his way through six glasses of red wine in quick succession and wobbles, glazed, towards the end of the tour.

The cast are tremendous. The likeness of each character is perfectly captured, from Ben Williams’s boisterous, jocular Bill to Matt Tierney’s weaselling Robert Cohn.

And yet, it never quite satisfies, largely due to an odd mix of styles. Where their fidelity and their explosion treat the text with reverence and inquiry, its frequent slips into spoof – plastic fish fly over the stage, the moustachioed Spanish hotelier coughs up his words – belittle and cheapen the rest, even as they land laughs. What ought to be dizzyingly humid, manages only tepidity. This should be stuffed to the brim or trimmed to the bone. It needs, quite frankly, to take the bull by the horns.