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Rosemary Branch, London, EUR >>>

2007

Fail Better Productions

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Adaptation

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Notes:
adaptation by Jonathan Heron and Christopher Tester, from Nikolai Gogol

Synopsis:
Proclaimed by the British Medical Journal as one of the first, and most explicit portraits of schizophrenia in literature, 'Diary of a Madman' isn't just an extraordinary sketch of one man's insanity. Written in 1834, Nikolai Gogol's dark, comedic short is also a pithy depiction of the gnawing tedium of life six links from the bottom of the administrative food chain. And it's made painfully familiar in Fail Better's accomplished, one-man performance. Through a series of diary entries written over the course of a year, it tells the story of Axenty Ivanovich a class-obsessed, middle-ranking civil servant in Tsarist Russia whose ascent to imagined greatness coincides with his descent into madness. The play begins with humorous pedantry - it takes several minutes of obsessive tidying, rigorous clothes-folding and pencil-over-blank-page-hovering before Ivanovich utters his first words. But the laughter soon gives way to something more sinister. An unrequited crush on his superior's daughter seems to trigger a latent psychosis, culminating in a series of disturbing, albeit imagined events (the murder of a talking dog that ruminates on his desperate position, his discovery that he's actually the King of Spain) before he is committed to an asylum.
-Tamara Gausi, Time Out London