Your Nose Seems To Be Running At Edinburgh

For two nights in a splendid building in the middle of Birmingham the latest theatre company to emerge from Warwick’s explosive drama scene performed their latest production; The Nose. An adaptation of the Gogol short story written by founder and director Josh Roche, the piece has already performed at Birmingham Fringe, will make a showing as the closing performance in the Studio for WSAF, and will be going up to Edinburgh over the summer. It is a piece that is all the more interesting for the ability to watch its evolution, and I went to catch its second night at the Custard Factory.

Already the Fat Git team have marked out a predilection for the absurd; their first production was The Resistable Rise Of Arturo Ui in the Arts Centre, a fabulous ensemble production filled to the brim with the work of Berkoff, Artaud and of course Brecht. After this, Josh Roche’s own written production When It Was May landed in the IATL Centre last term; more natural than the pieces preceding or succeeding it (but still with its aburdist moments) it was a spectacular piece of writing but, again, a piece that was growing organically throughout the entire process. The Nose takes elements of both of these productions but it has a different essence to either: it is theatre that mocks theatre itself, that consciously features cast in all black, that has actors consciously adopt physicality as they enter the staging area so you see the transformation (as if the all white cloth staging area in some way brainwashes the cast into doing its bidding) and allows the cast to break from the script entirely at points; sometimes the actor will deliver a line as themselves telling another actor to be quiet. Sometimes one of the cast will express their displeasure at their current part (Tom Syms, for example, played a magnificently indignant cafe table) or at times the cast are left to improvise around a basic framework. It is a risky piece, one that tries to do a lot.

Sometimes, however, this can be at its cost. It is a piece of theatre so aware of what theatre is, of what its roots are, and so confident in its style of performance, that occasionally one is left with the feeling of reading the footnotes to a really spectacular novel you wish you could read; the play spends a great deal of time as a satellite about Gogol’s short story occasionally dipping near the surface, and one is left feeling distanced as a result. The fiddling with structure and plot, whilst hilarious to some, left others confused as to what exactly was going on.

This is only a rare flaw however, and also one that can be somewhat overlooked; it is, after all, only about an hour long. The cast have thrown themselves into the piece with passion and fervour and there is not a single character or object in the play that isn’t filled with the nutrition of talented acting and good direction; the table in the newspaper office is an inspired character, the scene on the bridge (with permanently windswept scarves) is a delightful moment. The scene in the French cafe towards the start is possibly the finest moment of the entire production, a Pythonesque moment of wordplay and surrealism. Kate Pearse cuts a very fine figure as the lothario and aristocrat who loses his nose, Joe Boylan plays a marvellously world-weary barber and an assortment of other hilarious and insane parts. Tom Syms loads a variety of Russian figures with a sinister feline charm or a beguiling joy, and Mike Murray and Shubham Saraf, as the Beast and the Stick, were utterly spectacular in portraying a fairly abstract couple of narrators with surprising humanity. But Emma Jane Denly, as an assortment of the women of Russia, from cranky wife to spellcasting hag to owner of a very odd cafe indeed, absolutely stole my attention in every scene with a performance that stood out the most for me upon leaving.

If you get a chance to see The Nose, make sure you do; it is going to be something quite unlike anything else you see this year and is beautifully written and acted, if at times almost extravagantly so. If you have points to make, do tell somebody involved because this is a show still being crafted into a full product, and I myself hope I can get up to Edinburgh to see what creature it becomes by then.