One of NZ's leading playwrights, Ken Duncum has been writing for theatre and TV for over 20 years. Cherish won Best New New Zealand Play in 2003; Trick Of The Light won the same award the previous year. Ken's most recent play was Picture Perfect in 2006. In 2001 Ken was appointed Director of the MA Scriptwriting programme at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the writer of The Great Gatsby at The Court Theatre, July 25 – August 22.

You aren't the only one who's been adapting The Great Gatsby – there's a seven-and-a-half-hour staged reading of it, Gatz, by a New York theatre company doing the rounds at festivals in Europe plus an upcoming Baz Luhrmann film. So what's going on?
Well I didn't copy Baz or Gatz – I'd written my first draft before them! Possibly there is a zeitgeist, but I've been thinking about this for a long time. 

It's a rather ambitious task, adapting one of the great American novels to stage.
None of the previous stage versions has been particularly successful. I don't think they've captured the book. People have been too literal about the translation of book to stage; they haven't played to the strengths of theatre. What I am doing – not only cos of New Zealand budget constraints – is economy of scale, and I do believe this is the right way to do it. I'm not trying to be filmic; we don't need to fly in cars and swimming pools and have costly special effects. The acting is our special effect.

So why are you doing it?
I read the book at high school in Rotorua and I am one of those people who is still entranced by those things I found entrancing as a kid.  The book is great and I've been interested in getting it on stage cos in 80 years no one has cracked it, so I'm giving it a go!  It's interesting because I think it is the first truly modern novel. It was written in the 20s and it reads like here and now. It was trying to wrestle with things that relate to us now, to do with materialism, identity and a shifting moral compass.
  
What is it about essentially?
Power and wealth, and temptation, and how power and wealth are used to get away with stuff. And it's about fun – it's no fun to do everything right, and no fun to have no fun. People think it is a love story between Daisy and Gatsby, but what I have tried to do is play up the Nick/Jordan love story, which for me is the real love story of the book. it's a tragic Romeo and Juliet love story. Nick is our moral centre. He is tempted to go along with this decadent East Coast amoral life, but he discovers there's a sour side as well.

So why do the play now?
It's always been a good time to do this play. There's always been a cycle of boom then recession and of course it reminds us of the Roaring 20s. Also career-wise I'd felt I'd reached a point where I needed a real challenge. I wanted something where I could really flex my theatrical muscles, and what better than on someone else's great work. You see it with a lot of writers, eg, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Shakespeare did it with Don Quixote. It's like going to the artists' gym. There is a readymade work in another medium, and you can take someone else's story and blaze your own trail. The thing people love about Great Gatsby is the incredible language and I'm very interested in going back to a theatre that has beautiful language. There has to be a balance between lyricism, slang and storytelling. I started out as a poet and my earlier plays were about the use of language but increasingly I've got stuck in naturalism. Now people want more storytelling – look at Gatz, seven and a half hours of being read to! Any adaptation, though, has to walk the line between taking what you want and what you bring to it.


What do you bring to it?
I've brought an overarching idea about how it's staged, playing to the strengths of theatre. I've also brought my thematic interpretation, what I think is the juice of the story, which perhaps is diferrent from what was thought 80 years ago. I felt perfectly free to write my own dialogue, too. The thing is to be truthful not accurate. It's a playground. I loved writing it. Fitzgerald is a fantastic writer. I am respectful of him as an artist, but he wasn't writing a play. My hope is for people to be able to access the story in the most immediate way possible. Fitzgerald was still in his twenties when he wrote this novel and no one saw it coming. It's bloody fantastic, but I'm not trying to write a novel. I'm trying to present the book in a new way onstage.

You are famous for always including music, usually rock bands from the 60s and 70s in your plays, what should we expect here?
When I write plays I think about what kind of music the characters would listen to, what defines them. Fitzgerald coined the term the Jazz Age, but he didn't actually know a lot about jazz, yet he managed to create the era of "yellow cocktail music". In The Court’s production there will be a piano onstage, and the piano is important part of the play. This will be a great night out – it has comedy, romance, tragedy, music and dancing. I've written a song: "A Jazz History of the World", which is a song and dance number. There's another song that will be quite key too: "Poor Butterfly". It's a jazz standard and I found a terrific smoky Judy Garland version. The song was strangely apt with exactly the right kind of vibe.

You've written successfully for TV, eg, Willy Nilly, Cover Story, Duggan – yet I read that you get the greatest creative satisfaction from theatre.
I get the worst moments of my life and my absolute best from theatre. It's a rollercoaster. When it's good, there's nothing better. Plays seem to come naturally, have more flow. Theatre is suggestive whereas everything in film is detailed. Plays are about magic. There's the fact that you are in the same room with people doing the play and watching the play. When everything is working well, you have that energy. And it's a quick process. 18 months ago The Court's artistic director Ross Gumbly called me up and now it's going to be on.

Three of your plays – Blue Sky Boys, Flipside and Horseplay – feature on an all-time top 30 list of NZ plays – the highest tally of any playwright, and this is the first time any of your plays has been performed at the Court.
Actually Blue Sky Boys was performed at The Court many years ago - and the Wellington production of my play Flipside transferred to Court 2 back in the day as well. But I think The Great Gatsby will be my real Christchurch debut. It's a world premiere of course - and I think I have a play that will work well at The Court and that the people of Christchurch will find a real connection to. And hopefully that will just be the start of a long life for the play. I would like a lot of people to see this, both in New Zealand and beyond.

Over the past two years you have had productions of Cherish, about a surrogacy dispute between two gay and lesbian couples, in New York and Edmonton, Canada. How did it go?
Really well. Reviews were good, they were really impressed with the play but a bit bemused that it came from New Zealand. The director of the play in Edmonton is very proactive and trawls the web looking for scripts. He told me that he took my script to Starbucks and halfway through reading it he rang his theatre and said, ‘We've got to do of this play, if the second act is even half as good as the first, it's fantastic.'

What are your current projects?
At the moment I'm still finetuning Gatsby and writing a film script of my play Picture Perfect for South Pacific Pictures. Plus there are a few theatre projects I want to write.

The Great Gatsby
The Court Theatre, 25th July - 22nd August