Tag Archives: Nikolai Gogol

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

★★★★

Chichester Festival Theatre

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

Chichester Festival Theatre

★★★★

“brims with swearing, colloquialisms, double entendres, and joyful absurdity”

Nikolai Gogol’s razor-sharp satire The Government Inspector gets a bawdy and riotous reimagining in this new adaptation by Phil Porter, directed with pantomimic glee by Gregory Doran in his Chichester debut. Fuelled by farcical energy, the production is packed with verbal wit and physical comedy that rarely misses a beat.

The plot is deceptively simple: a small, corrupt provincial town panics at news that a government inspector is due to arrive incognito. When they mistake a feckless young civil servant for the feared official, chaos ensues. Enter Tom Rosenthal as Khlestakov, the supposed inspector, who quickly realises he can exploit the town’s credulous officials – a rollicking parade of grotesques, each more deluded than the last – for money, food, flattery, and more.

Rosenthal, best known for Friday Night Dinner and Plebs, brings his trademark hapless charm to Khlestakov, a delightfully louche fantasist revelling in the absurd power thrust upon him. In between extracting money, goods, and favours, he sets about seducing the Mayor’s wife (Sylvestra Le Touzel) – gloriously ridiculous, flirtatious, and determined to outshine her own daughter – and the daughter herself (Laurie Ogden), whose wide-eyed naïvety is tinged with a quiet desperation to be noticed. Ideally, he’d have both.

On first meeting Khlestakov in his sleazy accommodation, he seems somewhat subdued – especially compared with the cavalcade of comic officials who dominate early on with scene-stealing flourishes. But Rosenthal’s performance builds into a compelling piece of comic buffoonery – especially in a hilariously drunken return to the Mayor’s house after a boozy lunch. He is ably supported by Nick Haverson as Osip, his sardonic, long-suffering manservant.

Lloyd Hutchinson gives a standout performance as the morally bankrupt Mayor, his sweaty desperation rendered with delicious physicality. He’s joined by a motley crew of officials, each scrambling to ingratiate themselves and slip the impostor a few hundred roubles. There are strong comic turns throughout: Joe Dixon’s pompous Judge, whose knees keep giving way; Christopher Middleton’s cigar-fumbling Head of Schools; Oscar Pearce’s gleefully self-serving Charity Commissioner, all too happy to reveal the Mayor’s misdeeds; and Reuben Johnson’s jittery Postmaster. Miltos Yerolemou and Paul Rider are particularly entertaining as Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky – a Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee pair of nosy busybodies, obsessed with their own imagined importance.

These absurd officials are starkly contrasted with the town’s merchants, who visit the supposed inspector seeking justice, only to be swindled again. Leigh Quinn’s Sergeant’s Widow delivers a quietly devastating moment as she recounts being publicly beaten, revealing the scars on her back. It’s a grim reminder that beneath the foolery lie real-world consequences.

Porter’s script is sprightly and accessible, injecting Gogol’s 19th-century satire with contemporary irreverence. It brims with swearing, colloquialisms, double entendres, and joyful absurdity. Standout lines include Khlestakov describing the Mayor’s wife as a “randy old honey badger” and boasting he has “a pie in every finger” – playful, outrageous, and unexpectedly sharp.

The opening scene hints at something more substantial. The Mayor, pondering why St Petersburg might be sending a government inspector to their backwater, dismisses the idea of war – confidently assuring his colleagues that Russia would never be interested in such a remote place. It’s a fleeting but pointed allusion to contemporary geopolitics and a knowing nod to Gogol’s Ukrainian identity (acknowledged in the programme). While this moment garners a chuckle, such modern resonance is quickly left behind, as the production commits more fully to good-natured farce than to drawing serious parallels with 21st-century politics.

The production embraces the meta-theatricality woven into Gogol’s text. The characters’ frantic need to impress is echoed in the actors’ heightened delivery, exaggerated movement (thanks to movement director Mike Ashcroft), and frequent breaking of the fourth wall. The final “frozen tableau” – the moment of stunned silence when the real inspector is announced – is held just long enough to become hilariously awkward, prompting uneasy titters and a ripple of recognition.

Francis O’Connor’s set design captures a world teetering between grandeur and decay. The Mayor’s office-turned-drawing-room features filing cabinets bursting with paper and oversized doors that suggest delusions of grandeur. The inn’s squalid room, with its grimy skylight and claustrophobic scale, offers a stark contrast – and provides an excellent setup for a well-executed physical comedy. O’Connor’s costumes are a visual feast: lavish, absurd, and sharply attuned to each character’s vanity and social pretensions, particularly in the cases of the Mayor’s preening wife and posturing daughter.

Doran keeps the whole machine ticking with precision. The pace never flags. This is a lively and well-crafted revival that entertains with gusto. While it flirts with deeper contemporary parallels through its satirical edge, it ultimately settles for broad, enjoyable farce – and a very enjoyable one it is.



THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

Chichester Festival Theatre

Reviewed on 1st May 2025

by Ellen Cheshire

Photography by Ellie Kurttz

 

 

 


 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE | ★★★½ | January 2025
REDLANDS | ★★★★ | September 2024

 

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

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

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