Jennifer Olson

The Overcoat (Canada) World Stage, Toronto, Ontario

How CanStage's The Overcoat is Made

Originally created in 1997 by Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling for the Vancouver Playhouse,The Overcoat was performed this April as part of Toronto, Ontario's World Stage Festival. The play, which is without dialogue and performed to the music of Dmitrii Shostakovich, is based on two stories by Nikolai Gogol': “The Overcoat” and “Diary of a Madman.” Both of Gogol's stories, especially “The Overcoat,” do more than lend their fabulas to the production, however, they also lend their siuzhets.

The Overcoat follows the social rise and ensuing descent into madness of The Man, played superbly by Peter Anderson, as he purchases and then loses a custom-tailored overcoat to replace the grey rag he sports at the opening of the play. This basic plot, excluding the insanity, should sound familiar to anyone acquainted with Gogol's story of the same name. Panych and Gorling, however, wisely combine traits from Akakii Akakievich Bashmachkin (Gogol's wearer of The Overcoat) and Aksentii Ivanovich Poprishchin (the insane protagonist of “Diary of a Madman”) remaining faithful to the grotesque aspects of Gogol's stories while retaining the distance between the audience and The Man that Gogol' creates between the reader and his protagonists.

The most successful aspect of Akakii Akakievich's conflation with Aksentii Ivanovich is the prominence of sex throughout The Overcoat. The Man is surrounded by lust. From the blatant ogling of the Secretary to the Head of the Firm (Cyndi Mason) to the Landlady's (Tracey Ferencz) continuous come-ons to the anthropomorphization of The Man's new overcoat during a cleverly staged waltz between the two, Panych and Gorling have tapped an aspect of Gogol's work, especially present in “The Overcoat,” that is usually lost in translation. Dmitrii Chizhevskii points out that Gogol' describes The Overcoat “in a language of passion and love, in an erotic language” (312). Strengthening this type of relationship between Akakii Akakievich and his overcoat is the fact that the word for overcoat in Russian, “shinel',” is feminine.

Although Akakii Akakievich's love for a basic necessity (as a winter coat is during a St. Petersburg winter) has often been interpreted as a pathetic detail by many critics and readers, Chizhevskii asserts that it is mockery (313), and Boris Eikhenbaum maintains that Gogol's narrative style undermines all socially conscious readings of “The Overcoat” (189-191). In The Overcoat the erotic energy The Man focuses on his new overcoat at the expense of relationships with people sabotages any sympathy the audience may feel for the protagonist. When his landlady mends his old overcoat and brings it to him, The Man rejects not only the old garment in favour of his new one, he also definitively spurns the Landlady. Later in the play human contact and the coat come into conflict again. The Man loses his coat while receiving fellatio. Together, the two scenes emphasize that The Man can only relate to one thing and not to people.

Insanity is also used to highlight the grotesque and impose distance in The Overcoat. Inmates of an insane asylum are ubiquitous in the production. One inmate helps The Man get ready in the morning, two others reside at the same boarding house as The Man, and one walks across the tailor's atelier while attempting to woo a dressmaker's dummy. Although The Man does not become one of them until the very end of the play, his encroaching madness, wonderfully signalled by his moving in unison with the inmate who shares his lodgings, their constant presence intimates that The Man's mental state may be farther from sanity than initially appears and suggests that his inability to interact with even those individuals who are kind to him, such as the New Girl (Judi Closkey), is not normal.

The Overcoat then borrows not only events and character traits from Gogol's short story, but also the work's siuzhet. “The Overcoat” has at its foundation two standardized forms of literature: the romantic tale of a dead lover, such as Bürger's “Leonora” and Zhukhovskii's adaptation of that poem, “Svetlana,” (Chizhevsky 313) and hagiography. Both of these genres would have been common to all readers when Gogol' was writing, as they were the nineteenth-century Russian equivalent of popular literature. Gogol's use of popular genres is imitated by Panych and Gorling, who borrow from silent film in their The Overcoat.

Instead of opening with a rising curtain, as is typical in theatre, The Overcoat opens with The Man preparing for the day behind a scrim onto which the play's title, cast, and creative team are projected. The next reference to film is the set, which was designed by Ken MacDonald. The back wall of windows suggests the factory in Modern Times, and the giant wheel that appears later in the play alludes to another classic silent film, Metropolis. The lighting designed by Alan Brodie, which is dark, and the use of Shostakovich's music, some of which was written during era of silent movies, reinforce the cinematic feel of The Overcoat.

The decision to adapt Gogol's works into a silent film on stage allow Panych and Gorling to experiment with a universal physical language, which in many ways mirrors the universal foundation of the play's source material. An excellent example of using movement to express something for which words are normally used, bureaucratic jargon, is The Man's visit to the police station. In “The Overcoat,” Akakii Akakievich runs from office to office in the hope of finding someone who will help him get his coat back and in each office must negotiate language that no longer corresponds with anything. In The Overcoat, however, The Man only goes to a single office. The frustrating and arcane nature of police bureaucracy is suggested not by multiple trips to various offices or by specialised jargon, but by the half-speed movements of the police officers. Before the two policemen, who tend to move in unison, can point to the chair where The Man should sit, he is already half way there.

The final scene feels inconsistent with the rest of the play. In contrast to the moody, dark, and expressionistic rest of the play, the insane asylum to which The Man is confined is bathed in warm white light. The abrupt shift in mood might keep to the play's grotesque aspect because it suggests a possible parallel between a madhouse and heaven, especially since The Man's reaction to being put in a straight jacket is identical to his reaction when he first puts on his new overcoat, but it feels too neat and clichéd. More importantly, it undermines the distance between the stage and the audience for which the rest of the production strives. The return of the scrim onto which is projected “The End” after the scene in the asylum serves only to reinforce the fact that the final scene is out of place by shifting back to the cinematic feel of the rest of the play.

Despite the disconcerting ending, The Overcoat is superb and great fun to watch. The details are well thought-out and the execution is flawless. This is a production that will never feel dated.

Works Cited

• Chizhevsky, Dmitry. “About Gogol's ‘Overcoat’.” Trans. Robert A. Maguire. Gogol from the Twentieth Century. Eleven Essays. Ed. Robert A. Maguire. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974. 293-22.
• Eikhenbaum, B. M. “Kak sdelana ‘Shinel'’ Gogolia.” Skvoz' literatury. Sbornik statei. Slavistic Printings and Reprintings. The Hague: Mouton, 1962. 171-95.
• Gogol, Nikolai Vasilyevich. “The Overcoat.” Trans. Christopher English. Petersburg Tales. Marriage. The Government Inspector. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. 115-45.

© Jennifer Olson

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