Diamond Dick

The little-known shorter fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, on which this show is based, contains many potboilers he resentfully wrote throughout his career as less the literary legend than a cash-strapped writer. And with its opulent art deco style posters, PaperTape Theatre's Diamond Dick clicks straight away. This is an exercise in style, and the audience smiles at the concept as they shuffle into their seats.

Ready and waiting on stage is a movie set bustling with actors and crew. It’s the golden age of Hollywood and everything is in monochrome, from the painstakingly painted-up actors to the furniture and equipment. The audience is inside the silver screen and the illusion is stunning.

But aside from the aesthetics, and despite the slick performances, there’s nothing here for general audiences – no meaningful story to follow and nothing really to take away. The premise that the characters are filming an adaptation of Fitzgerald's story Diamond Dick bears no significance in its own right, and the play would likely be the same with another similar story as its central inspiration. And so when the lights go up at the end, a confused audience stays still – there must be more, right?

The show is misleading billed as “a tale of adventure and heartbreak on the streets of interwar New York” and, though strikingly elegant in its execution, this is more a demonstration of technique than a tale of anything in particular. A more accurate blurb would have been “look what we can do.”