“Uh-oh!” one felt on reading that the Tour de Force company, in collaboration with the American Dramatic Group Europe were presenting an adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” at the Abbaye de Neumünster . Not that the ADGE/TDF are anything but a competently professional troupe who have entertained us many times before, but that we might be confronted with yet another attempt to stage something unstageable, with all the consequent flaws, like giving concrete shape to things best imagined, reducing action to speeches describing action and telescoping months if not years into a couple of hours on stage.

So it was a pleasant surprise on Monday night when the five performers kicked things off by immediately close harmonising and dancing their way into the Vo Do Do De Oh Blues as if they’d all been time-shifted from the ‘20s. So much for literary over-obsession.

Blessed with such an unusually talented set of performers, the director Peter Joucla made full use of them throughout the evening, marking each of the eighteen scene changes with different musical numbers, all from the period, and in the process not only providing entertainment and emphasising the setting in Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age, but covering up what scene shifting was required by the minimalist set.

With that out of the way, short scenes and multiple changes become less distracting, and the resultant configuration of the piece fits the shape of the original more accurately than some more conventional structure would, giving stage reconstruction some of the advantages of film. Take eighteen significant episodes from most novels, and you pretty well present the characters and sum up the story.

Which all made therefore for a successful production, aided by a cast that acted effectively as well as performing the song-and-dance bits.

Just to recap what is probably familiar; the action all takes place in the summer of 1922, where a rich young couple, Tom and Daisy Buchanan (John Berry and Kathryn Duffy) live in what in England would be a stately home on the shore of a bay. On the opposite shore in another palatial home lives a mysterious character with no known background, Jay Gatsby (Andrew John Tait). Telling the story and observing the action is Daisy’s cousin, Nick (Charlie Kerson), who also is Jay’s neighbour and conducts a tentative but abortive affair with Daisy’s friend Jordan, a famous golfer, (Sharlit Deyzac).

Only five performers generally meant doubling up to bring in the minor characters. Only Kerson is blessed with only one role which he seemed to overplay somewhat to start with, settling back into a less extrovert personality as time went on. Sharlit Deyzac as Jordan handled her ambiguity well, and provided us with a believable Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, whose accidental death brings the whole castle tumbling down.

As Gatsby, Tait was thoroughly competent, but it is almost impossible to bring completely to life a fictional figure that has lived so long in the observer’s imagination. Nick describes him in the play as ‘gorgeous’ with a ‘heightened sensitivity to life’, and ‘a kind of romantic readiness I’ve never come across before’: try living up to that.

Wilson, Myrtle’s husband and the deus ex machina of the evening, was less of a challenge to him, and completely successful: And he threw in a butler of one’s dreams.

The problem inherent in Gatsby is also true of the legendarily beautiful Daisy Buchanan, as whom at least one Hollywood figure notoriously flopped. Kathryn Duffy was much better than that as the woman who has ‘been everywhere, seen everything and done everything’. A blonde wig might have fitted the traditional perception better: at least the lack of it avoided stereotyping. Duffy was also a hilarious Lucille McKee, Myrtle’s drunken friend.

John Berry’s Tom was I thought a trifle too continuously loud, though he has to lose his temper often enough, I don’t think he should have given off such a permanent aura of outrage. His minor character Woolfsheim, Jay’s gangster accomplice, was beautifully sleazy and ominous.

I already complemented the director. The women’s costumes were excellent as they needed to be for such a period-embedded piece. The minor men’s costumes also were, but Jay’s and Tom’s in particular were somewhat stiffly formal for action that takes place over a summer in a Long Island resort area. Men’s costumes are not so easily and quickly changed as women’s however. At least not in the theatre.

Gatsby is a tragedy. Essentially it is the same tragedy that exists in general in Fitzgerald’s work, the tragedy of people to whom money is no object, and the problem for them is what does there remain to do; the tragedy of, as Nick says, careless people who smash up things and creatures and then retreat back into their money, and leave other people to clean up after them.

The company here wove a tale that underscored that tragedy. Which I guess is what the adaptation of a book should do. My initial reservations were therefore happily wrong.

PHOTOS: © TOUR DE FORCE THEATRE COMPANY