The most artful of dodgers

For John Lithgow, art is a confidence trick. ‘I’m an actor,’ he said. ‘I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well that it isn’t.’ It’s a pithy phrase, but actors are pawns in the hands of playwrights – a troupe of Ted Baldwins jigging at Moriaty’s pleasure. This made me consider literary con artists.

Fresh from the success of The King’s Speech, Geoffrey Rush is in New York, playing Poprishchin, the deluded protagonist of Nicolai Gogol’s Diary of Madman. Giles Harvey has reviewed the adaptation for the New York Review of Books and he says that Gogol is ‘literature’s great confidence man’, whose ‘best work is founded on the cornerstone of deceit.’ The Inspector-General and Dead Souls are examinations of venality. In the former, a rake cons a town into thinking he’s a government stooge official and then takes advantage of more than the naivety of its virgins.