“Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it?” Not when it is spent in the company of Gatz.

As someone who has often pondered how much of his life is spent ”seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game”, The Great Gatsby was a formative text. From it’s sprawling summation of an age to its pinpoint characterisation, it is simultaneously concise and all-encompassing, a blueprint for that mythical beast: the Great American Novel.

So how could New York’s Elevator Repair Service theatre group dare to capture – not just catalogue but encapsulate – its entire text in the course of a play? By making it last all damn day. Gatz, which is running for another week at the Noel Coward Theatre in the West End, featured every word of The Great Gatsby. And not a syllable was wasted.

Those present had shunned the lure of Great British Heroic Failure with Andy Murray to take their seats in early afternoon, and were eager to understand how a plain office setting could be transformed into the shimmering world of West Egg. A few IT mishaps to get everyone onside only softened the tastebuds for the meat of the novel. Soon a bored white collar man became transfixed by the book he disinterestedly discovered, and within hours he was metamorphosed into its protagonist.

The slide from harddrives to highballs was so subtly done you had time to move with it. This was a deliciously intelligent production, weaving in peripheral characters in lighter moments while acutely positioning the duality of the modern world with the inner existence of the novel. It was not without problems though (its incomprehensible length aside).

As Baz Luhrmann will discover with his upcoming Gatsby film, fighting the preconceptions of an audience that is overwhelmingly familiar with the source text is tough. Although nobody acted completely as Fitzgerald’s characters – they inhabit them while remaining office staff, which did lend itself to light relief occasionally - Jim Fletcher as Jim Gatz didn’t have the quiet, muscular charisma my mind’s eye saw in Gatsby. Tom Buchanan was too coarse to be rounded. Some lines floundered, others stole too much limelight. My neck ached.

But Scott Shepherd became Nick, the narrator and vague moral compass of the piece. His performance was as much endurance as flair, but he was so engrossed in his part that you couldn’t help follow him into the shallows of excess and snippets of insight Fitzgerald knitted so long ago. Each time he announced a break (there were three) the leap into present consciousness was palpable. It was as complete a display of acting as I’ve witnessed in the flesh.

The ending at times felt like ”a single green light, minute and faraway” itself, not least when Gatsby’s doddering dad spent a wistful half-hour tittering onstage. With the time reaching 10.30, the first real signs of seat-shifting impatience set in on the balcony. But most were engrossed enough to be carried to the ending’s sad triumph.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Afterwards, on the Piccadilly Line with a carriage full of Rihanna-wannabes wasted and wet from Wireless Festival, Gatz already felt far away. But it is going to linger, in rich half-sleeps and exaggerated recollections, as a thing of beauty worthy of its weighty inspiration.