Russian slapstick at Coventry theatre – or perhaps not

I LOVED the genuine Russian singing and instrument playing at the start of this latest offering in the Belgrade Studio - and the set was imaginative and really rather beautiful.

Trouble was, I absolutely hated nearly all that was to follow.

The revival of this 19th century farce by Nikolai Gogol has an excellent cast and several redeeming features - but none of them did much for me.

Perhaps it is just the tedium of the humour that is somehow lost in translation. Though I doubt it.

Director Hamish Glen has been doing a whole series of plays on relationships and I enjoyed the recent Dark At the Top Of The Stairs.

And he’s probably right in picking up the rather contemporary feel of this particular play’s main theme - fear of commitment.

At one stage Robert Morgan, who plays the sailor Naschermunchsky, receives a spontaneous round of applause for his impassioned plea to win the bride as he laments on all the others he’s failed to accompany him down the aisle.

In fact this disevelled old sea dog seemed the only one capable of genuine devotion or even half capable of making the lovely Agafya (Janine Mellor) an honest woman - so long as she didn’t die of boredom first.

Instead, it’s the obnoxious Podkolyosin (Mark Fleischmann) she takes a fancy to but, perhaps because this is Russian humour, nobody ends up living happily ever after.

This is a heavy-handed farce that warms up in the second act.

Barbara Goulden