Fyodor Dostoevsky is possibly the last figure you’d associate with alternative cabaret or the theatre of the absurd. Yet Tom Basden’s play, produced for the Manchester international festival by comedy collective The Invisible Dot, suggests that he may have been the progenitor of both. In case you didn’t think Dostoevsky was capable of being funny, consider this: in 1865, he wrote a magazine story about a low-ranking civil servant named Ivan Matveitch who is swallowed whole by a crocodile but endeavours to fulfil his administrative duties from within the belly of the reptile.
The tone is wry, acerbic and closer to a surreal riff by Eddie Izzard than the Brothers Karamazov: “I am only uneasy as to the view my superiors may take of the incident,” says Ivan, “for having applied for a permit to go abroad I’ve got into a crocodile, which seems anything but clever.”
The creative team come with strong sitcom credentials: Basden is the creator of Plebs and contributor to The Wrong Mans; and it features Inbetweeners star Simon Bird. Though there are elements of Ionescu’s Rhinoceros, the overall tone is closer to Marriott Edgar’s nonsense poem Albert and the Lion. It’s notable that the initial response to the emergency in both Dostoevsky’s story and Edgar’s verse is a demand for compensation over the entrance fee.
A few details have been changed. Ivan, played by Ciarán Owens, is no longer a government official but a struggling actor whose one-man shows are so excruciating that his friend Zack (Simon Bird) pleads with him to desist. Yet getting eaten alive turns out to be a smart career move, as it brings instant celebrity to the man the press come to dub the Croc Monsieur.
Director Ned Bennett has an interesting line in creative anthropomorphism. For his production of Anna Jordan’s Yen he introduced an electric radiator that barked like a dog; here he establishes a snapping reptile that is quite patently a piano. Owens creates quite an impression as he disappears under its lid, though Bird’s low-key delivery seems to be seeking out a camera rather than playing to an audience.
Basden’s script sometimes feels a little anxious to elicit a laugh every third line, as if there’s a danger we might turn over and watch something else. Yet, if there’s a lesson to be gleaned from Dostoevsky’s satire, it’s that there is room to breathe, even inside a crocodile.
• At Pavilion theatre, Manchester, until 18 July. Box office: 0844 871 7654.
