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Literary and Philosophical Society Library, Newcastle upon Tyne

2009

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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Adaptation

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from Nikolai Gogol

Gogol's 1835 short story belongs to that typically Russian mode of writing where satire, farce and tragedy can co-exist without needing separate headings, and changes in tone are effected so smoothly that you can't see the join. I suppose the only word that comes close to covering it would be "absurd" in that it shows a pattern of everyday existence in such a light as to strip it of all meaning, so that even the overtly mundane becomes inherently ridiculous. This, in its most oblique and controlled manner, is why Chekhov's exquisitely melancholy dramas are (or should be) also funny. Gogol's fiction confronts the issue in a more head-on manner, wheeling out a gallery of grotesques and misfits who, large as they are on the page, do cry out for face-to-face dramatic engagement.
- Gail-Nina Anderson, British Theatre Guide