Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005

Heart of a Dog
Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Dolan Cummings
posted 27 August 2005

In this adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel, the action is transposed surprisingly successfully from Stalinist Russia to Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Certainly the company's highly physical approach and their use of African masks and song are in keeping with the surreal spirit of the novel.

Bulgakov's fondness for the absurd means that the differences between the two regimes are less important than they might otherwise be. The implied critique is less of a particular ideology than of a putative thuggish populism dressed up in radical intellectual clothes. Indeed, Bulgakov could be accused of a certain disdain for the masses in general as much as for Stalinism in particular; alarm that the uppity and stupid proles were getting ideas above their station. But such elitism can be forgiven in a novel as good as Heart of a Dog, and this production retains enough of what is good in the novel to render similar criticisms of its take on Zimbabwean politics beside the point.

Most importantly, though this piece is theatrically successful, making good use of the actors in a variety of auxiliary roles as inanimate objects as well as in character. The dog of the title is represented first by an appealing puppet, and then after his transplant with human organs, by an impressively made-up Dave Newman. The newly sentient canine speaks in contemporary advertising slogans, cleverly picking up on Bulgakov's haughty disdain for Marxist rhetoric, but the idea is perhaps not realised as well as it might have been, as the emphasis is very much on bathetic comedy. All in all, in fact, Heart of a Dog is more entertaining than it is thought-provoking, but there is nothing wrong with that.