DIARY OF A MADMAN/THE INHABITANTS OF THE MOON ARE NOSES. To 4 May.

London/Bath

DIARY OF A MADMAN/THE INHABITANTS OF THE MOON ARE NOSES
by Steve Hennessy

Blue Elephant Theatre Bethwin Road/Thompson’s Avenue SE5 0XT To 28 April
Tue-Sat 8pm
then Rondo Theatre Bath 3-4 May 2007
Runs 2hr One interval

TICKETS: 020 7701 0100
www.blueelephanttheatre (London)
01225 463362 (Bath)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 April

The mind behind Dead Souls and The Government Inspector in all its lack of clarity.
Bristol’s Stepping Out Theatre Company specialises in mental health matters, so it’s apt they’re looking at 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. Steve Hennessy has made a new adaptation of Gogol’s most direct look at insanity, the story Diary of a Madman, while his own new Gogol bio-drama adopts a suitably Gogolian style.

What chance could a child have with a father who specialised in Ukrainian puppet-theatre and a mother who, praying to St Nikolai after 3 miscarriages, promised a surviving child would be named after him, then regarded her offspring as having Christ-like potential? In literature, she saw him as the country’s greatest novelist and playwright, making it seem unfair Gogol’s death in 1852 (in his early forties) was followed by the work of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov.

Gogol saw his writing as an instrument to save Holy Russia, though its features are savage satire and grotesquery. In Diary of a Madman the savagery works outwards from an insignificant clerk who believes himself King of Spain (and listens to talking dogs). He tears apart those he sees as inferiors.

Seb Steiger gives this figure a convincing voice, reading canine love-letters from a blank white handkerchief, alternating between the commanding and the vulnerable. At the end he’s bathed in blinding white light, before curling-up and fading away. Yet, at first particularly, it’s a little inward; perfectly audible and clear but not immediately compelling.

Madman also explains the title of Hennessy’s original piece (seen last autumn in Bristol’s Theatre West season). Moons and noses recur in Gogol’s writing, while another of Inhabitants’s motives is the pig-like snorting Martin Aukland’s Gogol produces, a base jocularity his religion-minded mum finds infra dignitatis.

Aukland, as Gogol and his dad, plus Julia Gwynne as everyone else, play with rapidity and clarity. Penn O’Gara’s costumes include a neatly reversible gown which allows Gwynne to slip speedily between Countess Anna Tolstoy, who with her husband hosted Gogol’s last years, and a crazed cleric. And Gogol looks like the pre-crucified Christ in his last ordeal, at the hands of the age’s equally crazed medics. A feast for Gogolholics; a wild learning curve for the rest.

Diary of a Madman
Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin: Seb Steiger

The Inhabitants of the Moon are Noses
Nikolai Gogol/Vasily Gogol: Martin Aukland
Maria Gogol/Director of Imperial Theatres/Ivan Gogol/Professor/Student/God/Countess Anna Tolstoy/Fr Matvey Constantinovsky/Cab Driver/Dr Auver/Dr Tarasenkov: Julia Gwynne

Director/Lighting: Andy Burden
Designer: Peter Liddiard
Sound: Richard Jeffrey-Gray
Costume: Penn O’Gara

2007-04-07 07:33:14