Nikolai Gogol’s hapless civil servant Akaki Akakievich Basmachkin, the anti-protagonist of his masterly 1842 short story, has inspired a ballet by Shostakovich and a mime play by Marcel Marceau. Now, the little Russian who craved nothing more than an overcoat stars in this Gecko production that fits no obvious category. There is dance, but it is not a ballet. There is music, but it is not an opera. There is much mime, but it is not a mime performance. If you imagine Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill brainstorming an expressionist romp through Gogol’s tale, you may come close to what Gecko is doing. It is at once delightful, mesmerising and pointless.
       Amit Lahav, Gecko’s artistic director and star of the production, writes in the programme notes, “The external world for the protagonist Akaki is grey, hard and cold. Hs internal world is full of anxiety, lust and shame. To me his internal world is who he is – his external world is a shell conforming and conditioned to behave in certain ways.” One of the conceits of the production is that words do not matter. Characters communicate in different languages, apparently understanding one another more than a non-polyglot audience might. It is no help to understand Akaki’s ungrammatical Italian, the office manager’s vintage French or a colleague’s booming Japanese, because they are not really saying anything. The realm is dreamlike, making words matter less than image and movement more than plot. Meaning is left to the interpreter’s whim.
       The cast leaps and dances across and around the stage, beautifully manoeuvring their bodies in relation to one another and to strangely animate inanimate objects. The action, sometimes manic, reinforces the farce. The music is powerful, well timed to action and inaction, and intensifies a theatrical experience like few others. Gecko’s “The Overcoat” is not a story, it is a spectacle – a circus based on, but not confined by, the fertile imagination of one of Russia’s greatest writers. It is worth seeing, but hard to remember. Without a story, without a plot, without a convincing development of character through any dramatic transformation, it doesn’t leave much for memory to ponder. It is theatre in the moment. What happens after, after all, probably doesn’t matter anyway. Gogol would love it.
Charles Glass