The Overcoat
Barbican, London EC2
The split-level stage fills with scurrying commuters, some bunched in a swaying line (a tram, not a tube), others striding or cycling to work. Their movements are synchronised to music: Shostakovich's Jazz Suite determines their pace and that of the scene-shifters, all members of the 22-strong Canadian Stage Company.
Though The Overcoat is billed as the highlight of the London International Mime Festival, the production is unclassifiable. Its creators, Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling, call their work choreography, but neither comes from a dance background. Like Matthew Bourne in Play Without Words, they've devised a form of non-verbal musical drama. But where Bourne starts with dancers and musicians, Panych and Gorling require actors (or mimes) to time their moves to a recording.
The difference of approach matters. Narrative doesn't necessarily need words: look at silent movies, with music added afterwards. When the score is integral to the story-telling, however, we're in the domain of dance - treacherous territory for actors.
On the face of it, The Overcoat has a simple plot, merging two Gogol stories about oppressed clerks, The Overcoat and Diary of a Madman. The threadbare anti-hero (Peter Anderson, gawky, sad and sensitive) at last possesses a fine new coat. When it's stolen, he spirals into madness.
The production is about the society that reduces him to a cipher. He is a pen-pusher in a bureaucratic machine. His coat, instead of being made by a tailor, as in Gogol's story, is manufactured in a sweatshop. The elaborate nature of the busy crowd scenes is where the production runs into difficulties.
There's too much going on. Dance choreographers, whether for ballets or musicals, know that spectators crave coherence - hence the corps de ballet or chorus line. Individual performances need to be framed by unison patterns, set to music that's easy on the ear. Shostakovich composed plenty of ballet music (and his piano concerti have been used by choreographers), so he's not the problem.
Indeed, when the production comes closest to dance, in the central set-piece for cutters and sewers in the sweatshop, the audience responds in relief. The rest of the action is over-detailed, with the cast assuming some 65 roles in quick succession. Since they're no more than speedy caricatures, the effect, over 90 minutes, is blandly tiresome. Only when Anderson waltzes ecstatically with his new coat do movement and music fuse into metaphor. The coat takes on a life of its own: once it's gone, we're as downcast as the poor doomed clerk.
