The Overcoat

Gecko’s reworking of Gogol’s The Overcoat takes place in a dingy netherworld of the psyche where dreams, reality and nightmares collide. A multilingual cast of seven populate a dark cityscape where grimly determined crowds scuttle, scuffle and shove their way through dense smoky gloom. Jerking and strutting like clockwork marionettes, they bustle about in unprotesting obedience to the commands of an unseen and arbitrary authority.

Out of the resulting babel, a story emerges with the stark simplicity of silent-movie melodrama. We watch the frenetic futility with which ashen-faced hero Akakki struggles to ascend the ladder of bureaucratic lackeydom. The object of his desire is Natalia, who submits with absent, loose-limbed vacancy to the passionless contortions of their dreamlike pas-de-deux, but who can’t resist the aphrodisiac allure of the expensive overcoat that endlessly eludes her shabby admirer.

The appalling details of Gogol’s comfortless fantasy are brought to life with mordant meticulousness in a bravura display of deadpan clowning. Akakki’s parents’ eyes gleam with frigid disapproval as they stare down from a family portrait upon his shamefacedly squalid erotic misadventures. The walls of his bedroom expand and contract in the claustrophobic rhythm of his thwarted desires. The office where he slaves is a bedlam of flashing lights, incomprehensible orders and paperwork flung about to ever-more-manic musical accompaniment. And the piteous disintegration of his one, unsatisfactory, overcoat is documented with inch-perfect precision.

If all this sounds depressing, the effect – strangely – isn’t. Amit Lahav’s company bring wit and compassion and an essential lightness of touch to this grimmest of stories, aided by Ti Green’s bleakly playful set and some glorious lighting from James Farncombe. The Overcoat may be a bruisingly apt portrait of a society fixated on acquisition as an index of self-worth, but it’s also a bizarrely uplifting testimony to the human capacity for sympathy and dreams.