Theatre group brings Gogol's play to life

Jalandhar, April 10

About Nikolai Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’, Dostoevsky said, “We all came out of the overcoat.”

Amid the slowly rising heat of the early summer, Nikolai Gogol’s legendary story about a miserable St Petersburg copying clerk, who cannot afford an overcoat in his city’s exceeding chill; was adapted for stage by the YUVAA theatre group in Jalandhar, which ran to a nearly packed house from the city’s doting crowds. The play’s Saturday recital was brought to the audiences by the Romesh Chander Memorial Society.

A few years ago, one of the groups which presented a play during the YUVAA’s pan-national theatre festival — enacted a story about a bunch of men living and one of them dying — at a scrapyard. ‘The Overcoat’, in director-actor Ankur Sharma’s vivid portrayal of the clerk, brought forth memories of that scrapyard.

In a society filled with an increasingly entitled upper middle-class addicted to the rosy make-believe world of social media, the nuances of the men of the gutters and city underbellies are increasingly found missing in mainstream narratives. Fittingly, it is left to theatre to dwell on them.

The YUVAA’s cast brought out the nuances of the shivering, suffering, tortured man who spent the last years of his life dreaming of the ‘Bhed ki Khaal ka’ overcoat which hung daily in front of him at the store he worked in, but couldn’’t afford. A kind tailor friend made it for him but he passed — his muscles contracted with the city’s exceeding chill — before he could wear it.

Though the play is not the best of YUVAA’s stage outings, the story is necessary to be told to this age.