Reverse Nikolai Gogol’s original Russian title for The Nose and you have the word ‘son’, the Russian for ‘dream’, or ‘sleep’. This sentiment is crucial to the story. The plot is absurd: the nose of a Government Major in St Petersburg is found by a drunken man in his bread roll, who then parades around town dressed as an officer taunting its desperate owner. Adapting Gogol’s short surrealist story for the stage without losing that ethereal element was always going to be a formidable challenge. Fat Git Theatre, however, surpasses all expectations.The Nose is that rare product of intellect, imagination and an appreciation of theatrical form working in a sublime symbiosis. From the moment you step into the theatre, you are enveloped in a state of slumber. First the gentle strumming of a guitar, the tapping of metal, and swaying; then a delirious burst of energy – suggesting the throes of REM-sleep – that is relentlessly sustained throughout the rest of the play.The cast give a solid performance and with excellent timing they use mime, ventriloquism, physical dexterity and Russian music to great effect, creating something that’s almost cartoon-like in appearance. The script is well cultivated, it’s full of frills and flurries and demonstrates a voracious yet considered use of language; manipulating its rhythmic properties for a musical effect.This is a witty production, but that is it not to say that The Nose neglects the darker conflicts which pervade 19th Century Russian literature. Shubham Saraf as Stick - dangling money before the nose of a police officer, or masquerading as a dainty virgin - so brilliantly but so disconcertingly personifies vice and desire; qualities that occupied Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gogol in their examination of morality.The more gruelling details of the story are brought to life by the gruesome fluids that are secreted over a white backdrop and through the impressive facial contortions of our crazed, communist narrator. Beast, played by Michael Murray, commands the stage with an intense virility; tantalizing the audience as, with giddying dexterity and thrusts of the hip, he describes how ‘Napoleon made a lover’ of him.And what is the lesson of this play; that underlying parable for which all this has been so meticulously constructed? Well, there isn’t one. Of course, it’s a dream. ‘You have gained nothing’, Beast tells his dear audience; this is ‘cheap and trivial’.This is precisely why The Nose must be on any must-see list for this year’s Fringe. Yes, there are comparisons to be made with contemporary society (the power of the press being an uncanny one) but it is the lack of reason, the whole silliness and the frivolity of the play that makes it so fit for the Fringe: this is theatre for theatre’s sake, and it’s superb.
