Zelda Fitzgerald arrives for her regular Wednesday 3pm appointment with the psychiatrist at the sanatorium where she lives, or perhaps we should say where she is kept, but he isn’t there. The appointment is cancelled and she has an hour to herself to go over what has happened to her life.
Rifling through her own files, she traces her life from the sparkling young girl who first meets Lieutenant F. Scott Fitzgerald when he is posted to Alabama to the middle-aged woman still institutionalised as a schizophrenic, long after her husband’s death. She rewrites her own story as she goes defining how she wants to be remembered.
Zelda was too bright to be remain in parochial backwaters, and she and Scott lived the high life in New York and elsewhere with a style and vivacity that he poured into his books. The play asks the question if she was just the subject of his books, the original flapper, symbol of the jazz age, or more sinisterly did he use her diaries in his books, or even publish her short stories under her name?
Catherine DuBord captures Zelda’s energy in these early years displaying the verve with which she and Scott rampage through New York horrifying the likes of Dorothy Parker. The excitement to be alive is there, but a little more humour might just bind us to Zelda more tightly before what is to come. Maybe she burnt too brightly and too quickly, but it’s the abandonment by Scott that Zelda feels most painfully, even long after his death. DuBord transforms into the older, angrier, and sometimes score-settling woman with conviction.
There are some lovely moments in the production that make use of the limited lighting options in this small space. As Zelda recounts how Fitzgerald entered her life, Dubord is addressing the standard lamp as Scott, bathing her delighted face in a golden glow.
Zelda Fitzgerald is a fascinating character, never quite dropping out of history entirely, but not quite centre-stage either. DuBord’s adaptation of William Luce’s play pays tribute to a fierce intelligence with a lust for life that is immortalised in the novels of her husband. As she triumphantly announces, ‘I am his books’.
The Last Flapper runs until Sat 19 Aug 2023 at Greenside @Riddle’s Court – Clover Studio at 13:45