A RIOTOUS RUSSIAN SATIRE, FOR ALL TIMES
The local governor and councillors are posing for a photograph, more than satisfied with themselves and their genteelly corrupt side-hustles. But a letter announces an imminent government inspection. But the schoolchildren are underfed, the hospital a disgrace,the judge corrupt, the townspeople discontented . Funds have been cavalierly “redirected” to councillors’ interests. News of a lordly stranger calling for good wine at the local inn throws them into flat panic. One councillor gets topical 2024 laughs with the panicked line “I hereby call an independent Inquiry” and another even more with “We can’t blame it all on the plague, like we did last time!”
A grand one for local election week, because Nikolai Gogol’s famous satirical farce from 1836 is essentially about localism: petty bureaucratic tyranny and corruption. In its day it was considered so offensive that Tsar Nicholas I personally intervened in its favour and had it put on, saying it is not sinister “only a cheerful mockery of bad provincial officials”.
The stranger is not, of course, an Inspector at all: he’s a sacked low level copying clerk and gambler , summoned home in disgrace. He’s all swagger and irresponsible fantasy, held only in check from time to time by his faithful valet. But governor and council – the latter always scuttling brilliantly in and out together in close formation – welcome him with flattery and bribes. He accepts happily.
Patrick Myles’ merrily updated, fast-moving two hour version is sets to great effect in a sort of Ruritanian mixed-up period: the names are a bit 18c-comedy (the stranger is Fopdoodle, the Governor Swashprattle, and the two inseparable Ivans and Brabble and Grubble). Theres a horn gramphone and Fopdoodle boasts of writing Wilde’s plays and collaborating with his friend Dickens, but also writing Jane Austen’s novels, and when he imitaties his friend the prime minister, it is Churchill; but his uniform is all Napoleonic gold froggings, sword and breeches. All of this absolutely works. So do the jokes, not least physical: all the cast are fearless clowns with a gift for slapstick pratfalls, including Chaya Gupta as the Governor’s lovelorn daughter.
At its centre of course is the fraud himself: Kiell Smith-Bynoe’s Fopdoodle, particularly impressive in the long crazy ever-drunker bragging scene at the end of the first half. But his plan to seduce both wife and daughter moves just over the edge of prank into proper predatory nastiness, as does the moment when Dan Skinner’s Governor initially panicks and cries “It’s all in the wife’s name, take her!”
Indeed Gogol’s proper anger strikes through as it should in sharp moments between the jokes (which are excellent). At last when the fraud is uncovered, the trickster gone and the angry crowd throwing cabbages in through the French windows, Skinner becomes properly horrifying . It’s a theatrically famous breaking of the fourth wall when he leaps down to roar at us “What are you laughing at?” and utters a really Satanic lamenting boast that he, the con-man who cons con-men, the thief who robs thieves, has come to this. The council then turn on one another in a crazy final brawl, for all the world like the 2024 Tory party.
Owing to the infernal train strike I had to sneak up to the antepenultimate review, on the bank holiday and with the company having two days left to polish it up. No need to make allowances: already the cast were roaring through a riot of high-speed accurate farce acting, doing Gogol proud.
marylebonetheatre.com to 15 June
rating 4 plus an extra comedy-mouse for fearless pratfalls
theatreCat 