When you think of Fyodor Dostoevsky, you don’t tend to imagine a lot of chuckles. Harrowing chronicles of the miseries of the human condition, yes, giggles and guffaws – not so much. Which on the face of it makes it seem strange that Tom Basden – award-winning musical comic and sitcom writer – has chosen a Dostoevsky adaptation as his latest theatrical project.
But this isn’t a case of a funny man aiming to acquire gravitas by doing something ostentatiously serious and highbrow. It turns out the story Basden has chosen, The Crocodile, is one of the bleak Russian’s more whimsical outings. And rather than imposing gags on the narrative, Basden says, “the comedy comes from the story itself.”
The Crocodile tells the tale of a man who visits a zoo, and is unexpectedly eaten by the titular reptile. But rather than being digested, he finds life rather congenial in the belly of the beast and becomes something of a prize exhibit himself.
In the original telling, it’s a dry satire on the relative value of people and property. As Dostoevsky’s croc-victim, pondering the practicalities of extracting himself, muses: “In our age of industrial crisis, it is not easy to rip open the belly of a crocodile without economic compensation.” But at the same time, it’s a story about a man making speeches from inside a crocodile. It certainly feels more Eddie Izzard than Crime and Punishment.
“It’s very unusual, coming from someone like Dostoevsky,” says Basden. “In many ways, what attracted me to it is that it obviously has something really surreal and dark about it and overlaps with the ideas of people like Gogol, Kafka and Ionesco.” You can certainly imagine Dostoevsky’s Crocodile and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (the similarly satirical tale of a village whose inhabitants all unexpectedly turn into rhinos) as part of the same menagerie.
Basden also compares the story to Woody Allen’s celebrated standup routine about taking a moose to a dinner party. “There are things that are already in the story that are inherently theatrical and inherently funny,” he says. And while there are philosophical and satirical implications to the story, Basden is aiming for a colourful rather than didactic piece: “I want it to be visually rich and bold. And sort of rambunctious. From my point of view, it’s been a really fun thing to write and play with. Which is not really what I expected when thinking about adapting Dostoevsky.”
The Crocodile is the latest development in a fascinatingly eclectic career for Basden. Having been a Cambridge contemporary of Eddie Redmayne, Rebecca Hall and Dan Stevens (who he performed alongside in Footlights), Basden first came to national prominence as one-quarter of short-lived BBC Three sketch group Cowards. Since then, he’s won an Edinburgh best newcomer award for his gnomic musical comedy and become one of the hottest sitcom-writers around – creating ITV2’s Plebs and Radio 4’s Party as well as writing multiple episodes of acclaimed shows such as Fresh Meat and The Wrong Mans.
Throughout his career, Basden’s retained an interest in theatre. Party started life as an Edinburgh Fringe play prior to its radio success, while subsequent plays have included plane-crash comedy Holes, National Theatre commission There is a War and a comic reinterpretaton of Kafka’s The Trial. Basden’s Joseph K reimagined the forbidding original as a tale of screwy customer service and takeaway sushi. Now he’s hoping to perform a similar job on Dostoevsky, with the backing of The Invisible Dot – the award-festooned comedy venue-cum-production house that’s played a big part in shaping the careers of acts such as Joe Wilkinson and The Inbetweeners’ Simon Bird. They’re also involved in a number of other intriguing ventures at the festival, including a show from video experimenter (and one half of Adam and Joe) Adam Buxton plus their own oddball cabaret night.
Basden says he never feels conscious of a difference between his comedy and theatre work. “I’m sure there are people who feel that these are very different disciplines and should be kept apart,” he says, “but I’ve never felt like that and I’ve never had to act like that.” He just writes what he thinks is funny – with caveats. “I’m aware that different people laugh at different things. There are theatre audiences that would absolutely piss themselves watching Sheridan’s The Rivals and wouldn’t laugh at any of my plays.”
Theatre also played a big part in the shaping of Basden’s recent television career – his chance to help write BBC2’s big-budget caper comedy The Wrong Mans, co-created by and starring James Corden and Matthew Baynton, only came about because of Corden’s success on stage.
“It was a bit of a fluke really,” he explains. “I auditioned for the part of Noel in The Wrong Mans and I got it. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is good. An acting job, I’m going to be in this sitcom.’ But James Corden is phenomenally busy – at the time he was in One Man, Two Guvnors and it was becoming the biggest show in the world, which nobody expected. It was proving quite difficult to finish the first series of The Wrong Mans. So Matt came to me. I probably have the success of One Man, Two Guvnors to thank for allowing me to write The Wrong Mans.”
Right now, Basden is in Taipei (where he’s lived for much of the last year), typing his way through the next series of Plebs. He’s also recently shot a sketch pilot for the BBC – an adaptation of Freeze!, a long-running live show he performs with regular collaborator Tim Key, shot by Top Boy director J van Tulleken. If this makes the screen – and all fans of thoughtful and ambitious comedy should hope it does – it’s likely to boost the career of this quiet, self-effacing but reliably hilarious writer-performer to even more commanding heights.
Beyond that, he doesn’t want to say too much about the future. “I hate talking about what I’m doing next,” he says, “because it might not happen. And then people come up to you and say, ‘What happened to Mission Impossible 5? I thought you were going to be the lead in Mission Impossible 5.’ And then you have to go, ‘Yeah … no, that never happened in the end. They went with Cruise.’”
• The Crocodile is at Pavilion Theatre, Manchester, 14-18 July. Box office: 0844 871 7654.
•Adam Buxton & Friends is at Pavilion theatre, Manchester, 3-5 July. Box office: 0844 871 7654.
• The Invisible Dot Cabaret is at Pavilion Theatre, Manchester, 9-17 July. Box office: 0844 871 7654
