Overview

Ferhan Şensoy's play "Ce Fou de Gogol," written and staged in French in Montreal in 1974, won Monique Mercure, the play's sole performer, the "best actress" award and its author the "best foreign writer" award that year in Montreal. Twenty years later, the play was rewritten in Turkish and given the title "Gogol Duruşması" (The Trial of Gogol). The characters of the famous Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol judge the author within the framework of the story "The Diary of a Madman." Was Gogol a madman? Who is sane, then? In the play, Derya Baykal Şensoy portrays all of Gogol's characters, while Gogol's mocking voice from beyond the grave and the two separate collaborative shadows of the play's main character, the maid Mavra Mavroviç, 2nd Mavra and 3rd Mavra, and inevitably a Ukrainian pianist in a bow tie surround him in Petersburg, on Nevsky Prospect, each holding a madman's diary.