The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 77

Running wild: The Nose in Nottingham. Photograph byNeilLibbert lives? The poetry of space travel remains (MotiridB pltsIsDiragi Michael Qoveney sees Gogol's Hooter turn social climber and sexual conqueror, and declares the play WINNER BY A NOSE "an't stop, must run, says Gogol's itinerant proboscis, two nostrils rooted in the realms of science fiction. In a series of stylized, snapshot scenes in a humming antiseptic laboratory suspended in a firmament of planets (great design by Stewart Laing), we meet other astronauts, notably Trevor Peacock's grizzled old moon-walking veteran who describes the surface's grey biscuit colour, and the eclipse of the earth with his thumb; their disgruntled or supportive partners; and the head of the unit. (Nigel Terry) who allocates" the shuttle spaces. Paul's sharpest exchanges are with a Texan spacegirl (Annabelle Apsion) who really does see nothing remarkable beneath the visiting moon.

Curiously, for all his research, Godfrey ends up with no theories, not much meat and a rather interesting, idiosyncratic and well-written play about why this should be so. I am a great admirer of the David Glass Ensemble his Popeye was a gem, and his co-production of Les Enfants du Paradis with Shared Experience a lost treasure but his new version of Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast is a neck. Noseless, he learns sexual humility, though John Wayne Bpbbitt could teach him a thing or two about materialist exploitation. In its scenes of petty officialdom, sullen servitude and the screeching flappmess of a widow and her tall daughter (Elizabeth Estensen and the euphonious Cinnamon Faye), the show tinkers with an audience's familiarity with Gogol's A Government Inspector. But its quirkiness is distinctly that of Gogol the inspired prose satirist, and Beaton's adaptation, and Duncan's company, admirably convey his insidious and characteristic flavour.

In the late Twenties that same flavour commended Gogol's story to Shostakovich for an operatic treatment. That Nose was picked from oblivion by the English National Opera in 1974, die year before Shostakovich died. Another 'lost Shostakovich', the 1958 operetta Cheryomushki was mounted last November by Pimlico Opera and, as Lucy Bailey's doggedly inventive production returns to Hammersmith, I can only echo the disappointment voiced last year by Andrew Porter. Shostakovich loved Lehar and Offenbach, but much of his lighthearted score sounds more like Julian Slade without the true vitality of Salad Days. As theatre, it's a non-starter, despite the witty new English version by David Pountney and the vigorous re-orchestrations by Gerard McBurney.

The title refers to a brutal new high-rise housing estate on the outskirts of Moscow. Three couples are moving in, but a corrupt politician and his floozy commandeer a knock-through apartment, causing a collapsed in ceiling and an instant eviction. The tenants unite in the cause of their post-Stalinist 'paradise'. The effect is akin to watching that old Stratford Hast collaborations between Joan Littlcwood and John Wells about the scandal of the Kenan Point apartment block through a distorting, and deadening, time warp. The action intermittently jollied along by a holiday-camp chorus line moves, very slowly, from the Museum of Reconstruction to the housing estate and a magic garden (where a bench will not tolerate lies).

There are cardboard cut-out costumes, winking lights, a bad Alison Steadman impersonation in a beehive wig (or was this meant to be l.ily thumpingly on legs, as he exits through the stalls. The Nose job at the resurgent Nottingham Playhouse is a delightful adaptation by Mistair Beaton of a brilliant shorrstory with Bobbitty overtones: the discarded organ, pooh-poohing surgical rehabilitation, has a mind of its own and ideas of self-advancement. Whereas Gogol's nose is a freakish ectoplasm in die grey mist of mid-igth-century St Petersburg, theatrical nasal-gazing involves visible development: the nose nesdes, initially, like an unwanted slug, in the bread roll of a drunken barber, then whizzes round the stage, increasing in size on each appearance, until it sprouts arms and legs and sports a green coat emblazoned with medals. Inside, and right up his own nose, is the actor Phelim McDermott, who manages die extraordinary feat of making the olfactory organ humorous and sympathetic. 'My nose is a state exclaims Kovalyov (Robert Bathurst), the distraught collegiate assessor whose social pretensions have encouraged his own hooter to stick up for itself and get out of hand.

I low wonderful, and how alarming, if our bits and pieces refused instructions from mission control. Such a breakdown in the nervous system is the farcical side of a coin tossed in the air by Oliver Sacks and lately dramatised by Peter Brook in The Mem Who. On Tim Matley's clever design of receding perspectives, panelled interiors, an overstuffed newspaper office (where Kovalyov tries to place a small ad in the Lost and Pound section) and a candlelit church, Martin Duncan's exuberant, metamorphic production, his first as the Playhouse's new artistic director, treads a fine line between farce and fantasy. In church, the impertinent and inquisitive nose gooses the female faithful, one of whom is not at all upset and begins to ride a new cock horse. And while Kovalyov learns the hard way that 'a little love, a little tenderness' (a plaintive, melodic setting by Peter Salem) are worth praying for, his nose goes walkabout like a randy sailor on shore leave.

I lis own noselessness is highlighted in a metal mask clamped to his head like a superfluous chastity bell. As a complete man, he's a pain in the tedious hotch-potch of sub-CompIicitc physical theatre that is neither all that original nor truly comprehensible even to anyone who has read Theroux's terrific book. Adaptation here proves to be diminution of themes, descriptive writing and, especially, the wildly eccentric character of Allie Pox who leads his family from American 'civilisation' to the heart of darkness in the I londuran jungle. The Nose Nottingham Playhouse (0115 941 9A 1 9); Cheryomushki Lyric, Hammersmith, London W6 (0181 741 2311): The Blue Ball RNT Cottesloe, London SL1. (01 71 928 2252); The Mosquito Coast Young Vic, London SL I (01 71928 6363) An astronaut, Alex (Dexter Plctcher), is selected for the moonshot in I louston, and Paul wants to know what it was like.

Mis last play, he reveals, was about music (that is, Godfrey's Once in a While the Odd Thini Huppnis, a charming reverie on Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. I. ike Sam Shcpard researching an earlier ace pilot, Chuck Yeagar, (or his performance in the film The Rujlit Shift', Godfrey wants to get in really close. But his questions are too large and too vague and the answers are unimaginable and therefore unpronouncecl. This is the point: how can we define an experience that is beyond experience and, at the same time, part of so many unamusing songs about the dream of a lovesick construction worker and the power of collective The liveliest music is in triple time, and Wasfi Kani in the pit stirs up an admirable clatter of unexceptional sound.

The singing is uneven and most of the act ing worse. Paul Godfrey's new play The Blue Ball at the National is a go-minute enquiry into the magic of space exploration and the private lives of astronauts. Godfrey directs his own cast of characters which includes a playwright palled Paul (Peter Darling) researching this very play, the same way as Wallace Shawn played John Lahr in pursuit of Joe Qrton in the film Prick Up Your Ears. BOX OFFICE FIRST CALL $977 24 HOURS, 7 PAV, e.t wotmni; (HOOKING ij i I GLORIOUS" MlaiM 1.