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The Overcoat
An adaptation, with live music, of Nikolai Gogol’s classic tragic-comic tale.
The five-piece band were on stage in this production, taking up different positions at different moments of the piece. The production had much more spoken text than in most Clod Ensemble pieces – and the score reflects this.
The recordings below have none of the spoken text as they were made for archival purposes. They were recorded in a rehearsal room in Bath while on tour, using two mics and a portable minidisk recorder. The piano is pretty out of tune and had an unreliable sustain pedal. The pedal eventually broke entirely, and the final few tracks were never recorded.
The score for ‘The Overcoat’ was built out of lots of small pieces of material – three- or four-note riffs, glissando strings gestures and arpeggio patters. Paul says; “at the time, I was pretty obsessed with Carl Stalling’s music for cartoons. I was experimenting with the kind of movement it provoked in actors – especially using cut-up musical fragments and assembling them in almost irrational ways.” This track is an example of this sound.
This was written for a movement sequence involving the whole cast.
Paul Clark - Music
Band
Violin - Calina de la Mare
Cello - Laura Fairhurst
Guitar - James Keane
Clarinet - Niall Web
Piano - John Paul Gandy
“Paul Clark's score is a delight, not so much an accompaniment to the action as a character in it - so often the boast and so rarely the achievement of much music theatre.”
The Independent (1998)
“a refreshing reinvention of the interplay between live music and drama”
The Times
An adaptation, with live music, of Nikolai Gogol’s classic tragic-comic tale.
