The Russian Youth Theater justifies its name, not only on the basis of attracting young Russians to its performances, but also in terms of those actors who perform on its stage as well as the its guest directors. During the last season the theater's administration experimented by inviting young directors. This season the innovation is being repeated, and just as successfully. The most recent example of collaboration with a young director is Nina Chusova's production of "The Overcoat" by Nikolai Gogol. Her credentials are impeccable: As well as being a graduate from Russia's prestigious State Institute of Theatrical Arts, she is also a student of the celebrated director, Leonid Heifetz.

The famous and oft-repeated phrase "we have all come out of Gogol's Overcoat," which is pronounced at the very end of the play, is something you recall from the very start. You understand that the strange, almost surrealistic story written by the great mystic is the quintessence of today's (and yesterday's) society as well as being the most popular literary and theatrical event of the last two centuries.

The story of the clerk, Arkady Arkadevich Bashmachkin and his misadventures, in this instance, is treated as a farce that is at one and the same time extremely funny and desperately tragic. Arkady Arkadevich is played (by another State Institute of Theatrical Arts graduate) Pavel Derevyanko, a rare actor by today's standards, due to his repertoire of classic neurotics. Very short in stature, unusually mobile, looking like a grown man in profile, but from the front like a little boy with a guileless smile and masses of charm, he is exceptionally capable of arousing sympathy from the audience. His Arkady Arkadevich is a "little man," somewhat absurd, absent-minded and unremarkable, who sharply senses reality but who does not want to resign himself to being a clown or someone who is despised and humiliated. His co-actors (Elena Galibina, Alexander Grishaev and Oleg Gerasimov) by contrast appear to have been selected for their height and style, almost as though they were made out of different dough.

For this Arkady Arkadevich, the overcoat (in the play it is a separate person with a character and actions) is the pass into another life, the opportunity to break out of an existence that is nothing more than the lowest of the low. In addition, he is simply in love with it: the scene when he, as such a little person, embraces the overcoat, wallowing in its endless folds, is the most touching scene in the production.

Everyone knows what fate awaits those who are lyrically disposed and sensitive in a cynically indifferent and complacent society. Suffocated by heaps of unnecessary documents, Arkady Arkadevich, in the direct and figurative sense, is eventually crushed by bureaucracy. The director, having broadened the framework of Gogol's work and endowed it with an even greater wealth of meaning, convincingly manages the momentary transfer from humor to tragedy. For the audience this production is an opportunity to rediscover a well-known literary piece ,and be enthralled by the work of the new generation of talented young actors.

The next performance is on May 12

The Russian Youth Theatre
2 Theater Ploshad
Metro: Okhotny Ryad
Tel: 292-0069