The Great Gatsby
thewardrobetheatre.com

On the first day of this year, as Brexit happened, a less-noticed cultural sundering took place. Fsfexit, let’s call it. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby came out of copyright.

Such creative free-for-alls, as well as cutting the income of descendants, are nervous for admirers of the work, as the new possibility of projects unfairly blocked by the estate is balanced alongside the emergence of versions that risk disturbance of the earth in which the creator lies.

The peace of FSG’s plot at Old Saint Mary’s Catholic Church cemetery in Maryland was surely threatened by the just-published Nick (No Exit Press), a weak prequel to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece by Michael Farris Smith. And there might also have been subterranean tremors at news of a two-woman version of The Great Gatsby, filmed in Bristol’s empty Wardrobe Theatre earlier in lockdown and now streamed throughout March as a “theatre film”.