Bruce Kirkley, U College of the Fraser Valley
Refashioning The Overcoat

As “theatre without words,” Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling’s The Overcoat privileges the visual over the literary, and creates a dynamic tension between these two modes of artistic experience. Their adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story diverges significantly from (yet does not entirely abandon) the conventions of dramatic/literary theatre and presents the audience with a visual narrative evocative of early 20th century painting and film. To create the performance, Panych and Gorling employed a movement-based process founded on Jacques Lecoq and incorporating the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. The highly expressive physical acting style which emerged echoes the demonstrative physicality of silent film acting. The performers’ bodies become the locus of narrative expression, setting up a tension with the audience’s easier familiarity with a dramatic/literary framework. The acting style combines with Ken MacDonald’s set design to evoke early 20th century constructivism, futurism and expressionism. When the production was adapted for television, cinematographer Bob Aschmann employed techniques derived from silent film-makers such as Eisenstein and Vertov. Yet concurrently, the actors are clothed in Nancy Bryant’s realistic fin de siècle costuming, and the entire project engages the work of a seminal figure in the development of 19th century European realism – Nikolai Gogol. This paper explores the multiple layers of refashioning found in the stage and television versions of The Overcoat and considers how these projects embrace an idea of contemporary theatre as a site of intermediality in which theatre “challenges its own history as a traditional medium of literate culture” (Peter Boenisch).