Too Clever By Half

Too Clever By Half

by Alexander Ostrovsky
Directed by Martin Parr
London and on tour to Derby as part of ‘Derby Live'
November & December, 2013

Cast Featured
Samuel Townsend
Ben Eagle
Emily Cairns

Welcome to a dog-eat-dog world where a crafty, grasping and cut-throat rogues gallery of charlatans and hypocritical schemers vie to outdo one another in a dazzling tour de force of duplicity and unscrupulous ambition.

Written in the mid-19th century by the most prolific Russian social satirist Ostrovsky, this perennially fresh and hilarious comedy of bad manners focuses on our rogue-hero Gloumov as he claws his way from shabby obscurity to the top of the social pile, using whatever means he can and stepping on whoever is in his way in order to get there.

Staged in traverse, audiences were confronted with an image of themselves across the performance space. From the opening, with the raising of chandeliers and crucifixes to the flies, the spectacular scene changes played out behind theatrical footlights to the ultimate scene as the chandelier crashed onto the stage, the production was steeped in the theatrics of the 19th Century, all with a surreal twist.