Tag Archives: Marylebone Theatre

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

★★★★

Marylebone Theatre

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.

 

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR at the Marylebone Theatre

Reviewed on 8th May 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Oliver King

 


 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN | ★★★★ | March 2024
A SHERLOCK CAROL | ★★★★ | November 2023
THE DRY HOUSE | ★★½ | April 2023

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

Click here to see our Recommended Shows page

 

THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN

★★★★

Marylebone Theatre

THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN at the Marylebone Theatre

★★★★

“a stark parable of hope for post-Covid Britain”

In these post-Covid years, one might very well question the merits of paying to see the monologic disillusionment of a lonely man played out on stage. Indeed, one would be forgiven for mistaking Laurence Boswell’s ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (newly adapted for the Marylebone Theatre from Dostoyevsky’s novella of the same name) for advertising itself as doing just that.

Boswell puts his idea for the inception of the play down to long walks towards the end of the Covid pandemic. It was then that he began to contemplate Dostoyevsky’s story as having vital resonances to the peculiar cultural context of the post-pandemic years. This spurred his decision to transplant the play and its one-man protagonist, played by Greg Hicks, to the Hackney of the modern day.

The play begins with Hicks soliloquising upon a tale of life as a ‘meaningless accident in an indifferent and seemingly meaningless universe’. The account of this tale eventually brings him to the point of suicide, before he collapses into a sleep. As he sleeps he begins to dream of a surreal utopian world which comes to redefine his perspective on the realities of his own life. The volte face which plays out in Hicks’ mind brilliantly manifests itself in the intimate surroundings of the stage. Much of this effect hinges upon the dynamism and vitality of his performance, while its structure is underpinned by Boswell’s careful rendering of Dostoyevsky’s prose for performance.

Perhaps the only notable area where Boswell’s adaptation falls short lies in the, admittedly difficult, task of capturing the original text’s peculiarly risible quality. Translated literally, Dostoyevsky’s Russian title, Сон смешного человека, reads as ‘A Funny Man’s Dream’. Mikhail Bakhtin famously posited the story’s place as a model late 19th century example of Menippean satire, citing the ultimately playful undertone of the protagonist’s revelatory dream and the action which follows. Hicks’ performance lends itself more towards serious philosophical contemplation than the more surreal or farcical interpretations of the original, though this is not altogether to the diminution of the play’s dramatic effect.

 

 

Indeed, Hicks remains, necessarily, the sustaining force of the play, and moments of exposition or extended speech are deployed economically. Moreover, there is much to be said for the production’s remarkably deft means of expressing the philosophical pertinences of Dostoyevsky’s novella wordlessly. From the complementarily layered approach to costume (Caroline Stevens) and lighting (Ben Ormerod) to demarcate between the protagonist’s states of consciousness, to Gary Sefton’s similarly effective direction of Hicks’ movement and positioning on the stage. Each of these components works seamlessly to shift the production’s mise en scène and mood without slipping into ungainly segues in scene or prop changes.

The overarching potentiality of the production lies in the very fact that it tends ultimately not towards nihilism but hope. Indeed, the play presents an inversion of ‘nihilistic’ narratives reminiscent of its opening scene, such as Dürrenmatt’s ‘The Physicist’, or Büchner’s ‘Woyzeck’. Instead its plot centres upon a spiritual ascent from, rather than a psychological downward-spiral toward, an individual’s state of meaninglessness.

The combined efforts of Boswell and his creative team result in a set (Loren Elstein) of deft minimalism, capable of facilitating the play’s characteristically Dostoyevskian dialogue between themes of social realism and individual imagination. The result is a play which effectively expresses the principles of its inspiration. In Boswell’s programme notes, he writes of Dostoyevsky’s story as an homage to the human capacity to create stories. The play’s defining impetus lies in visually exploring the limits of this capacity. In doing so, it prompts a fundamental further contemplation, namely ‘that beyond thinking we might see’ different consciousnesses, and come to believe in bolder realities, than our own. Boswell has managed to repurpose Dostoyevsky’s original into a stark parable of hope for post-Covid Britain

 


THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN at the Marylebone Theatre

Reviewed on 28th March 2024

by Flynn Hallman

Photography by Mark Senior

 

 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

A SHERLOCK CAROL | ★★★★ | November 2023
THE DRY HOUSE | ★★½ | April 2023

THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN

THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN

Click here to see our Recommended Shows page