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CHRISTOPHER TESTER |
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Nationality: n/a Email: n/a Website: n/a |
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Literary Agent: n/a |
Please send me a biography and information about this Playwright
xxx doollee
Plays by Christopher Tester |
Diary Of A Madman | ||
| 1st Produced: | 2007 | |||||
Company: | Fail Better Productions | |||||
| 1st Published: | I don't think it has been published. Try emailing Playwright or Agent where listed at top of page. | ISBN/ASIN: | - | |||
| Music: | - | doollee no | #73230 | |||
To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||||
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Genre: | Adaptation | |||||
| Parts: | Male | 1 | Female | - | ||
Parts other: | - | |||||
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. | |||||
Further Reference: | - | |||||
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