Going up

Fitzgerald's one thing. Squint your eyes and flap a copy of Gatsby in front of you and it looks a bit like a play. But the utter ambition and militant vision it would take for a director pull off a stage-adaptation of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's ode to interwar-period self-exploration, is frightening. Alarmingly, John Collins—founder and director of Elevator Repair Service, a company infamous for taking on those literary behemoths that no one else would dare touch—is attempting to do precisely that. Is he mad?

To my relief, Collins comes off less mad thespian than friendly science teacher; there's a slow-burning methodical quality to his description of his craft that does away with my skepticism. "When we first read this one it was the dialogue that really struck us," he explains. "I sensed that there was a play inside of this novel. It meant that we had to resolve the issue of how long it was going to take, because this was going to be more of a regular adaptation than the things that we had been doing. That was a challenge that we were ready for."

Collins' take on my Gatsby-flapping theory? “Hemingway is a lot harder to penetrate than Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby more than any other novel of his, feels so beautifully refined and so thoroughly wrought. Hemingway puts up these walls of text, and has these descriptions of things that have nothing to do with the story he's telling. He gives you these very detailed landscapes that you have to navigate. That's something we've had to undertake in making this piece. Hemingway's writing is more deceptive in a way and he's harder to follow because you never know when he's just off on a digression, or whether that digression in fact has meaning.”

But Collins seems up for the challenge. “It's been fun to work on," he insists. "But it's been more about being in a forest of text, and clearing away something that's inside it. A lot of it has been trying to sort out the role of Jake Barnes, the narrator, and how he starts out as our guide. And in our play, he gets to disappear into it more. He narrates less and less and he becomes pulled into the scenes, and then finally comes out on the other side.”

Elevator Repair Service, founded by Collins in 1991 and named after a career suggestion given by a computerized test he took at school, has been performing Gatz since 2005 to great acclaim. So when work started on The Sun Also Rises, the group's approach was largely the same: "We just sat down and read it through without a plan. I like to start without a plan because I like for the solutions we come up with to be ones we come to intuitively, whether we're all around a table or all on our feet in the rehearsal room."

A few blocks over at the New York Theater Workshop, where the ensemble holds rehearsals, Collins explains his background in sound design, and something, for lack of better term, clicks: "Acting is not what I do," he states. "I enjoy performing a lot, but that's what sound design was for me. It was performing. It wasn't design in the sense that I would do editing and recording outside of rehearsal, and bring it in and have an assistant run it. It was just stuff that I did in rehearsal. I played it with the actors, I didn't write anything down. I just had samples on the keyboard."

With this in mind, I find myself able to articulate what is so unique about ERS, their interplay with their surroundings, and Collins' manner: Coming from a technical background, and working without a trace of "actor" to him, injects something refreshing into his leadership. He has a reverence for the technical aspects of theatre that are often either overlooked, or given disproportionate recognition. And though nowadays Collins is comfortable staying firmly in his director's chair, he sticks to his sensory ethos: Sound, he explains, is real. "Sound is more effective in the theatre than any other medium. You can look around and tell that the sets aren't real, that the lights are theatrical. But sound works on your consciousness. We always start with sound."

Collins' background, having been involved in the experimental theatre Mecca that was Manhattan's East Village in the early nineties, evokes all manner of romantic imagery – mainly of those legendary small theatre spaces that inspired everyone from Bertolt Brecht to Jonathan Larson: "They're all bars now!" I don't want to mention that I know this is true first-hand. "It's funny, Nada [a former performance space] was such a small theatre, but I did so many shows there. There was House of Candles which is now a restaurant. There was Piano Store which is now Piano's [a trendy Lower East Side celebrity haunt]. That area was a little hotbed of cheap, low-budget, mostly really bad theatre. But in the best way."

One pressing question remains: The Sun Also Rises centres around an American, an English woman and a posh Scottish man. Will the ensemble, who boldly face scrutiny from theatrical and literary critics alike, attempt accents?

"Kind of!" he laughs. I really hope we get a pass on those." Wading somewhere away from linguistics, Collins adds: "Hemingway was the one who wrote about the experience of being away from America, lost in between the wars in Europe. There's a way in which these characters feel really at home in Europe, but also very displaced. They're not really at home anywhere."

The Sun Also RisesRoyal Lyceum Theatre14-17 Aug, times vary, £10-£27