Life With An Idiot
October 2001
Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, London
‘I’, Life With An Idiot
" Life with an idiot is full of surprises! "
An adaptation of Victor Erofeyev’s short story, transposed to a chic contemporary minimalist flat, the show follows the invasion of a couple’s life by an idiot which they must take into their home as punishment for a unnamed misdemeanour at the husband’s work.
The production employed a kind of coarse puppetry to explore the sexual anarchy and violence of Vova, the Idiot, who terrorises the couple and drives them apart, first seducing the wife, Masha and then the husband, ‘I’.
The perfectly white environment, created with an unnervingly low ceiling by the designer Fred Meller, was by the end of the piece desecrated by shit, blood and semen, represented by chocolate, tomato ketchup and porridge. Moving from its beginnings in a suffocatingly chic restraint, the production ends in murder, rape and necrophilia, and the committing of the husband to the lunatic asylum from which Vova was brought.