THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR at the Marylebone Theatre

★★★★

“for a comedy of misunderstandings, it is easy to understand why the play has become a classic”

The Russian-American novelist, Vladímir Nabokov, said of Gogol’s “The Government Inspector”: “It begins with a blinding flash of lightning and ends in a thunderclap… and is wholly placed in the tense gap between the flash and the crash”. Patrick Myles’ adaptation stays perfectly true to Nabokov’s description, literally reading it as a stage direction. Except Myles has downplayed (for the better) any sense of tension, filling the gap instead with its flashes and crashes of humour. There are subtle updates in the language that bring the play closer to our own time, but the original satirising of greed, stupidity, political corruption and hypocrisy needs little tweaking to sound as relevant today as it did nearly two hundred years ago.

In a Northern English provincial town, Governor Swashprattle (Dan Skinner) wakes from a nightmare only to be plunged into more misery as the town’s corrupt officials assemble to spread the news that an incognito inspector will soon be arriving to investigate them all. In the flurry of activity to cover up their misconduct and misdemeanours, further panic erupts from the suspicion that he has already arrived. They blindly assume that the over-privileged Londoner staying at the local inn is he. Percy Fopdoodle (Kiell Smith-Bynoe) quickly cottons on to their mistake and, being the unscrupulous hustler that he is, milks it for all he can, accepting all their bribes and soaking up their wine and women.

The comedy is frequently slapstick, and always farcical. But perhaps too pronounced, exaggerated even, as the characters compete for laughs. There is a definite ‘Blackadder’ feel, with Pythonesque touches. And it is difficult not to bring to mind ‘Fawlty Towers’ – particularly, of course, ‘The Hotel Inspectors’ episode. Yet there is also a restoration feel, and the characters all have names that are a mix of P. G. Wodehouse and pantomime. It is a mash-up that is reflected in Melanie Jane Brooke’s set and costume. The Governor is a Napoleon lookalike, while his daughter (a hilarious Chaya Gupta) dresses like an overpampered poodle. Cultural references surf the centuries too, yet bizarrely it somehow works, like a Chuck Berry guitar solo layered over Beethoven’s ‘da-da-da-dum’.

The performances are suitably heightened. Skinner’s Governor Swashprattle is a distinctly unlikeable chap, but we warm to him in a boo-hiss kind of way. Smith-Bynoe’s smooth-talking grifter holds the show with a commanding performance. We (almost) sympathise with the irresistible urge of this con-man to out-con the con-artists. The narrative is fantastically preposterous, until the fourth wall is broken and there is a sinister realisation that the farce is quite close to the bone. The famous last lines that the Governor throws to the audience “What are you laughing about? You are laughing about yourselves!” are famous, yet overshadowed in topicality by others in Myles’ revised text; at one moment poignantly stealing from, and paraphrasing, Stalin: ‘It’s not who votes that counts – it’s who counts the votes’.

Social commentary or fantasy? “The Government Inspector” is both. Its targets are obvious and the depiction of them clear cut but caricature. Opening and closing with a bang, it is loud and funny in between. Some subtlety wouldn’t have gone amiss, but for a comedy of misunderstandings, it is easy to understand why the play has become a classic.