Here are listed articles about Gogol's Madman. Scroll down to read or click on a headline to be taken directly to that artcle.

- Slide into insanity: a triumph
- A portrait of insanity: an inventive offering from Little Earthquake

Nottingham Evening Post - Alan Geary - 4/9/2006

Slide into insanity: a triumph

CONSIDERING the stolen picture we see of her, the crush that down-trodden pen-pusher Axenty Ivanov Poprishchin has on the boss's daughter, Sophie, at first seems entirely natural. But in the loneliness of his miserable room it becomes a crazed obsession. In the end a straitjacketed Poprishchin is carted off to a lunatic asylum thinking he's the King of Spain. At one point during his decent into madness he rounds off a solitary game of chess played against himself by swallowing some of the white pawns.

As a portrayal and study of tragic self-delusion and insanity, this hour-long studio piece, written, directed and performed by Gareth Nicholls, is at many levels outstanding work.

Sound effects are excellent. Even before the action starts, you know you're in for a disturbing hour. The unearthly sound of a theremin - an early electronic instrument sounding like a too perfect human voice - is heard on that Clara Rockmore recording.

The lighting, crucial in this play, is outstanding, most notably in the erotically-charged episode where Poprishchin peers through a half-open door into Sophie's boudoir.

Using a mobile face and sensitive mime, and with sustained dramatic irony, Nicholls tells and acts Gogol's 1835 tale Diary of a Madman. But his narrative also steps outside the story so that incidentally it alludes to the bizarre and unhappy life and death of the author himself.

This Little Earthquake production deserves another showing in Nottingham, preferably at a larger venue and the sooner the better.

Metro - Wayne Burrows - 29/8/2006

A portrait of insanity: an inventive offering from Little Earthquake

Little Earthquake is a new Birmingham-based theatre company on a mission to find the curious tales that lurk unnoticed in our culture. Whether drawn from literary classics, folklore or just the neglected corners of our collective imaginations, the company and its collaborators are determined to bring the off-kilter and strange to a stage near you.

So far this has led to two productions: one in response to Edgar Allan Poe's gothic tales of premature burial; the other an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's Russian classic The Diary of a Madman. The two plays are linked by the legend that Gogol's own coffin, when unearthed during work on a St Petersburg cemetery, showed signs that the eccentric author had been buried alive, with scratches on the inside of the casket lid.

"I was drawn to Gogol by the many contradictions in his work," explains Little Earthquake founder Gareth Nicholls. "He was writing in 1834, at a time when the medical profession was just beginning to investigate how the mind works, and his book drew on the latest serious scientific theories of the day. But it was also an age when asylums like Bethlem in London invited the paying public to see the mad as a source of entertainment, and Gogol does both things at once."

The Russian author certainly knew his subject. He was reputedly obsessed with his own bizarre appearance, well known as a compulsive liar, incapable of distinguished truth from fiction, and beset by religious delusions in later life. Poprishchin, the story's anti-hero, shares many aspects of his creator's own experience, from a domineering mother to paranoia about the judgemental society around him.

"He was writing when the idea of the mad genius was taking hold," says Nicholls. "It was only deemed possible to create real art if you left the mundane world behind so, by portraying himself as mad, Gogol was tapping into a fashionable idea while also questioning the assumptions of his readers about the line between madness and sanity. It's left open whether it's Poprishchin's madness that has isolated him or society's rejections that have driven him over the edge."

Originally staged as a work-in-progress in 2005, Gogol's Madman is a one-man show written, performed and directed by Nicholls himself, which has been revived and expanded, in response to audience feedback, for this new tour. Special performances for groups of psychiatrists and mental health professionals were held to ensure that the portrayal of madness was accurate, and the idea of work that evolves in an ongoing collaboration with audiences is at the heart of the company's philosophy.

"I set up Little Earthquake because I was working as a freelance actor and there were no opportunities to explore the stories that fascinated me," Nicholls explains. "I wanted to take ideas to extremes, give them twists, tip our usual view of the world upside-down and pull stories around like Plasticine. There are so many of these wonderful, absurd, ghoulish stories out there, and we wanted to give people the chance to see them."

With only shoestring budgets, realising the company's big ambitions depends on imaginative direction and virtuoso performances. The talking dogs, disintegrating sanity and shifting perspectives would present a challenge to the most lavish budgeted Hollywood CGI studios. "We use a lot of everyday objects in unexpected ways," admits Nicholls. "The lack of resources like projectors and state-of-the-art technology makes us far more inventive, so a pair of old shoes can become talking dogs, and mirrors, books and chairs can all be used to build up a very convincingly strange world. I like to think of it as the equal to cinema's special effects - but unplugged."