There are many parallels to be made between the American writer Raymond Carver and his literary idol, Anton Chekhov. Both were masters of the short story who died relatively young of lung disease; both married strong women artists late in their careers; both shared an interest in fishing; and both had names beginning with C.
Perhaps this is to push the correspondences too far, though no more forcefully than this Live Theatre/ Northern Stage joint production which sets up a dialogue between the two writers through a temporal time loop.
The initial idea was to stage new adaptations of the writers' stories back-to-back, as the centrepiece of the Newcastle short story festival. But that was before the team became excited by the idea of "simultaneity" and engaged writer Margaret Wilkinson to fashion a beguiling but baffling fantasia on Chekho-Carverian themes.
The outcome is a bizarre mix of Cossack hoods and water coolers, in which a dinner party of 19th-century Russians engage in genteel discussion over aesthetics, while a blue-collar American couple seethe with recriminations over the murder of a young girl. Things take a further surreal turn when a naked man bounds out of the lake and begins inhabiting both time frames at once, though only a close scrutiny of Wilkinson's text will tell you that the intruder is supposed to be identified with the famous Russian painter who was the murdered girl's great-grandfather.
Neil Murray's production is enhanced with some felicitous moments of visual poetry - beetroot soup splashes onto a tablecloth in the 20th century as a consumptive coughs up blood 100 years earlier - yet you wonder if the narrative has been contrived to accommodate these images rather than allowing them to evolve naturally. Kaput is an ambitious collaborative venture, yet perhaps in this case there have been too many cooks spoiling the borscht.
<B&183; Until October 30. Box office: 0191-232 1232.
