Its proven popular appeal also neatly undermines the annual conversation on mime’s perceived image problem in this country that trails the LIMF with a depressing monotony. Every year the organisers ready themselves for the inevitable question regarding the prejudice of white gloves and invisible walls that surround the name (even Jacques Lecoq wrote in his book The Moving Body that he was forbidden from using the word mime at the Theatre National Populaire in Paris in 1956) Each year they let the programme do the talking. Fusing the stories of The Overcoat and Diary of a Madman, and featuring only the music of Shostakovich and a cast of 22, The Overcoat has sold out across Canada and has since been made into an award winning film.
The Overcoat comes to London this month as part of the 26th London International Mime Festival – now one of the biggest festivals of its kind – and tellingly, is the largest production the festival has ever featured. Six years later CanStage have that most unusual theatrical contradiction on their hands: a mime blockbuster. “I couldn’t see how a North American audience could find it accessible.” North America proved him wrong.

When Martin Bragg, artistic director of Canada’s largest theatre company CanStage, was first approached with the idea of staging an adaptation of two Gogol short stories he was initially sceptical. “I thought these two stories had the potential to be unbelievably depressing.” He was even more doubtful when the directors added that they wanted to stage it without words. “But the husband is boorish and simple, and while she grows – to use one of those crappy therapy words – his commitment to her is so inflexible, so set in stone, that even when she has an affair, he is not threatened. Eddie’s love is so intense that he ends up buying the hotel itself.”‘Honeymoon Suite’, Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London SW1 ( ; 020-7565 5000) 8 Jan – 7 Feb. The audience sees them as 18-year-olds “trying to get it together”, as a middle-aged couple enduring a silver wedding anniversary replete with painful silences, and then reunited in their late sixties (for which Eddie is played by John Alderton) after a long period apart.”It is like watching three plays within a play,” says Bean. “The couples understand each other’s dilemmas and explain them for each other.

Then it all makes sense.”"The middle-aged Irene goes on a spiritual journey of personal development – and has a career – which takes her away from her husband,” reveals Bean. (“After all, we all have IKEA-type relationships that last three years,” says Bean.) The father, whom you never see, has had to make sacrifices to pay for the whole wedding: “It has a knock-on effect. Eddie always feels he must overcompensate, to thank the father,” says Bean. “It is a form of madness, and ruins the marriage.”Directed by Paul Miller, the action of the 90-minute play is confined to the one room. “It is this hotel room that holds profound emotions for them; all their memories,” says Bean. The couple are shown at different stages of life, with six actors on the stage performing alongside each other.