Monthly Archives: May 2025

BROWN BRITISH LIVES, FROM ENOCH TO SUNAK

 Sathnam Sanghera’s novel drew on his own life,  partly homage to Arnold Bennett and with some echoes of Priestley too, joined the fine chronicles of our nation-of-shopkeepers a few years ago:  a Londonized,  de-cultured  young man’s reconnection to his Punjabi Sikh family and community in the West Midlands.  It’s a far subtler book than the lopsided but entertaining, play made here from it by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti,  directed by Iqbal Khan who gave us East is East and the Buddha of Suburbia. 

     It’s a fifty-year span: the first half  is in the old shop and old ways,  with an invalid and then dead father and Avita Jay as a mother anxious to get her daughters,  Kaljit and Surinder,  married safely off.  Surinder,  a lively and likeable performance by Anoushka Deshmukh,  is the academically bright one with wider ideas; she  runs off with the chocolate rep (Tommy Belshaw, doubling later as an even more dislikeable potential father-in-law) .  He is a beguiling but pretentious wannabe writer who calls her Sue. She comes – too briefly evoked – to see through him.   The family in Wolverhampton conveniently pretend she is dead, and  Kamaljit marries conventionally and keeps to the old life. 

         The second act shoots forward thirty-odd years to pivot at first to London with Kamaljit’s son Arjan , a successful creative-director engaged to a white girl. He goes north and hangs out with the roguish Ranjit , scion of a rival shop,   dutifully appears to wash and bury his father according to tradition and plans to look after his mother.   The struggle between the lad’s  new life and his old identity is subtle in the novel, but rather dashed through here, probably because by now we’re far more interested in the women. That’s unfortunate, since despite Jaz Singh  Jeal’s charm  the rapid and slight storyline makes Arjan  actually rather dislikeable:  his response to male confusion being weed and a wild one-night stand,  while his kindly London girlfriend,  anxious to be non-racist and multicultural,  has gone to trouble to find his vanished Auntie Surinder and offers to make a multigenerational home with his Mum. Who doesn’t , as it happens , need it,  Kiran Landa’s convincingly-aged Kamaljit rising here to a pleasing matriarchal firmness,  sorting out her issues with the long-vanished Sue   and finally – as the play lurches towards a happy ending –  breaking up a fight between the two young men and vowing to get an alcohol licence.   

          I found it fascinating, for all the emotional holes and bumps ,  having at my age lived as an adult through those five decades and more in an England where South Asian lives came to matter more and more. All the way, you might say, from Enoch to Sunak.  The greatest pleasures are in small scenes in the first act:  the sisters together,  the daily life of the shop,  the invalid father dreaming for all of them how “we will be kings of Englna, we will show them!”,  Surinder’s teacher trying to persuade the family to let her do A levels,  her own longing  “to be somebody”” but also her fascination with the awful chocolate-rep, who quotes Dylan Thomas and making her miss the moment of her father’s death because of this novelty,  this illicit ‘rum and raisin” chocolate  in her dutiful life of “Shop , Gurdwara, launderette..”.   

      So in the end, when the adaptor firmly wrenches the present-day story into a happy ending and everyone ends up at a wedding throwing wild multicultural shapes together,  all is well.  There’s affection. But there could have been more.    

lyric.co.uk  to 21 June 

RATING 3

It is indeed PLUTO not Apollo who rules the Underworld. Was tired. Apologies to all classicists.

SONDHEIM AND THE STYX

  I last saw this 405BC  Greek classic in Spymonkey’s version and found it – sorry – unfroggettable.  Giant puppetry, a community chorus tap-dancing as frogs while Xanthias and Dionysos travel to Hades to clown-up Aristophanes’ tale about the  god of theatre,  worried about war and chaos going to Hades to bring back either Euripides or Aeschylus to save the world with heroic wisdom.   This time it’s Stephen Sondheim’s take,  though he was never quite happy with it as it ran too long and was launched in a Yale swimming pool where everyone got wet.

      This is neater, shorter and dryer, and does finally offer beyond the laughs  some wisdom.  There’s a mass of artful theatre reference and jokes from the start,  the amiable Dan Buckley as Dionysos instructing the audience Greek-style and Kevin McHale from Glee, on a London stage debut,  as Xanthias his slave (“I prefer to say intern).  Sondheim – with Burt Shevelove and bits from Nathan Lane –  updates it so that that the playwright they first look for in Hades is George Bernard Shaw (the old windbag is serendipitously up West right now, with Mrs Warren’s Profession).  In the end they do find him,  Martha Pothen playing it barnstormingly, irritatingly intellectual-Irish in a baggy suit and big beard with famous lines like “All great truths begin as blasphemies.  Amid the circle of dead dramatic colleagues we get his rants against Shakespeare as a vapidly ornamental, intellectually null stealer of plots.  Which of them does the troubled world need most – the poet or the pragmatist? Which should Dionysos bring home?

        But that all comes later – indeed in the last quarter of the show – when the pair fight a magnificent brawling quote-off,  culminating in Bart Lambert as a gentle Shakespeare singing “Fear no more the heat o’the sun” as against Shaw’s St Joan at the stake.    Before that we have the journey,  Joaquin Pedro Valdes as a supercool Heracles in lionskin  with the “Gotta dress big!”  Number,  a hilariously Yorkshire Charon the ferryman (Carl Patrick) declining responsibility on behalf of the River Styx Cruise Line, and some unexpectedly lovely songs like Dionysos’ lament for Ariadne and  “Its only a Play”. 

      And oh yes, we have the frogs that torment the travellers:  the limber, hyperactive chorus suddenly in terrible rubberized  lips and lolling tongues, representing the lumpen mass,  cynical inactive resignation, sucking the idealists down.   “Ri-ke-ke-kek, Ri-ke-ke-kek – whaddya care , the world’s a wreck,  Why’d’ya wanna break your neck?  what the hek, ri-ke-ke-kek!”.  They only get one scene, but make it count.  

       So does Victoria Scone as Pluto, god of the underworld in an Edna-Everage getup of marabou and spangles, receiving whoops of drag joy in praising Hell as a va-va-voom hot resort.  So there are plenty of moments, and some real feeling, notably in Buckley’s  anxiously well-meaning but preening Dionysos as he struggles to bring back wisdom and beauty and referee the final fight between Shaw and Shakespeare.  Once or twice I felt it sag a bit – despite the crisp two-hours-plus-interval shape – but when those last scenes arrived forgave it everything.

        And good for Southwark: who doesn’t thrill at the arrival of a rare Sondheim revival, done with merry energy and heart for £35, less if you’re young, old or unwaged?   As young Kevin McHale, self-mocking on his UK stage debut down towards Elephant and Castle  murmurs,  “It’s not technically West End, but it’s cute”.   It’s more than that. 

Southwarkplayhouse.co.uk. To 28 june

DROWNING PASSION,   TIMELESS RESCUE

Marvellous play, this: wrenches the heart out of you , patches it up and sets it back on the hard road of life and love.  It wrenched Terence Rattigan himself, close to a loss of his own:  the first thing he said after learning his own terrible news was to conceive of a play starting “with the body discovered dead in front of a gas fire”.   

       So it does,  though its greatness lies in Hester’s recovery – she forgot to put a shilling in the gas-meter – and the unfolding depiction of her disastrous passion and crumbling despair. The late moments , when Miller the struck-off doctor saves her once more with bruising, healing truth,  are some of the finest in all theatre. When actors can lead you through such a reality without exaggeration or hamming,  it is an emotional event important in almost any life. 

        So it’s a play that needs the best;  director Lindsay Posner treats it with proper respect, in a note-perfect,  seedy wallpaper-crumbling 1930s flat,  and the casting is perfect,  from the first arrival of the naive young couple (tremulous Lisa Ambalavanar and nervously dutiful Preston Nyman) with Selina Cadell’s landlady,  we are there in that rooming-house world with its rent anxieties and respectability,  soon aware that “Mrs Page” is no such thing,  but Lady Collyer, runaway wife of a judge.  And that her lover Freddie is no good for her.   Every character thereafter hits the right note dead-on:  Finbar Lynch’s dourly wise Miller,  Nicholas Farrell’s wounded, hopeful Judge,  and eventually Hadley Fraser’s jaunty, defensive Freddie with his golf-clubs,  letting off steam tipsily to his pal Jackie (Marc Elliott) about how forgetting a woman’s birthday isn’t such a crime and how awful it is to get “tangled up in people’s emotions” and need to flee. 

       They’re all perfect. And of course at their centre is Hester herself:  Tamsin Greig.  I worried at first, in the low-key early scenes with Miller, the judge and Freddie himself,  that she was far too quiet,  dangerously near-inaudible sometimes, as if  giving more of a subtle screen than big-theatre stage performance. But in effect her presence, power and judgement outweighed that and the problem improved: I doubt anybody missed anything, and her emotional truth  – and indeed comic timing at times – overwhelmed any misgivings.  

      She gives us a woman in early mid-life, perhaps too much protected by respectability for too long, her very paintings on the wall too timid but with dignity, irony and sometimes even a dark wit about her own helpless need for awful Freddie . But her very qualities of self-awareness put her at risk as she crumbles into despising what she is and what she has done with her life.  In the second half her encounters with a series of men – including the judge’s unwise “don’t you realize what I’m offering?”,  the wonderful, dry wit of her dealings with Philip and her terrible pleading with Freddie – are breathtaking in their truthful, mundane depth.  And Freddie too  takes the fearful step into honesty with a famous line, which could be terrible but somehow isn’t:  “We’re death to each other, you and I”.  

      Rattigan also never fails to offer us, just casually on the side, some other line that sticks. This time it’s Mrs Elton as the landlady who gets to reflect, as she bustles out, “Strange how one always seems to prefer nice people to good people” .  

trh.co.uk. to 21 June

Rating 4

I said it all at the Royal Court – https://theatrecat.com/2024/11/09/giant-royal-court-theatre/ – and it is an event not to miss, especially the way the world is in 2025.   Everything i said there i felt and saw again.

But here are brief reflections on how  it felt going back..

1   There have been murmurs, one or two in print, of worry about audience laughter. In case it meant sympathy with Dahl’s antisemitism. I heard none of this: all the laughs were at absurdity, and in the right spirit.

And when Dahl shockingly doubles down in he Coren call a great shocked sigh at the Hitler line was real.

   2 – Lithgow catches, in this brilliantly balanced and intuitive script, the quality in all bigotry that hunches close to paranoia: persecuted by a bad back, envious of other writers – and his own illustrator Quentin Blake – he clings  to his distaste and medicates it with his claim – not all false – to compassion for Gaza.  

    And at the same time this human frailty, which we all feel in ourselves sometimes, has its faint wounded echo in Jessie. And on Maschler’s collaborative, sensible, practical attempsts at defence.

3-     Humans protecting one another can always hide within the “doesnt really mean it” defence.

   But Jessie, alone, really does.  Which underlines how muchmof the play is about Englishness – noticing the Maschler “Provence” riposte – and  as a young friend told me aster seeing the Anne Frank play, American Jews are different from Englisn Jews

4 – it works just as well in a bigger theatre. That’s proper power. And I had forgotten how stunning the seconf half is..

So do go.  b now at

Haroldpintertheatre.co.uk.  to 2 august. but Here again is the full first review

GIANT Royal Court Theatre

WELL WORTH THE MONEYPENNY

       This is glorious: just what we all needed.   In the company’s spirit of never wasting a terrible joke, I absolutely Bond-ed to it.   Following Mischief Theatre with devotion, ever aince their 2013 Play that goes Wrong was born I have joyed in their disciplined but clownishly fearless tactic of mixing up half a dozen comic genres  – from silly to satanically-subtle –  and rattling them at you till you’re helpless.   So here is top physical slapstick and terrible puns,  knowing parody and determinedly dumb farce, a dash of character-comedy, fast patter and Wodehousian absurdity , all in bucketfuls of pure energy.  And it’s a happy thing to see four of the Mischief founders out there in person, co-author Henries Lewis and Shields, Dave Hearn and Nancy Zamit. 

        This time, under New York director Matt di Carlo,  they take on the irresistible world of spy films from Bond to Smiley, setting it all in 1961 and opening – just to limber us up – with a Whitehall office scene with the magisterial Henry Lewis as M thoroughly summoning  and confusing single-letter colleagues In a blinkingly rapid vaudeville moment,  ending by explaining that the code is just there  “for ease”, whereon four E’s storm in. Then it settles into the main plot. Two Soviet agents are Charlie Russell as Elena,  scornfully omnicompetent, and Chris Leask as Sergei, who works ceaselessly and hopelessly  at living his cover ‘legend” as British Dr Tim (“a spleen expert”). Vieing with them  to stop a traitor handing over a deadly secret is the CIA man, Hearn as Lance Buchanan , and  OMG he has all the gestures, crouching to expected explosions then shouting “Clear!”.  He is living down various failures, not helped by the arrival of Zamit as his possessive ex-spy Mum, always up for a kill-mission and prone to reminisce about other legends of the trade  “sucked a bullet out of his thigh, that was a great party”.  Meanwhile the innocents (or are they?)who tangle with the spies in a hotel are Adele James as Rosemary and her boyfriend Bernard – Shields does a wonderful Wodehousian nitwit –  and Lewis as a pompous actor who has come to audition for the first Bond film. And, of course, thinks the Americans must be from the studio.  

    Soon – in David Farley’s expensively brilliant set  – there is a two-storey Battenburg-cake of four hotel rooms where they all plot, misunderstand,  bug one another, and spectacularly fall through floors and out of windows (Mischief is athletically brave).  Jokes at every level from complex to asinine come at you rapidly, and in the second half there is much neon spectacular, plenty of blink-and-you-miss it background jokes, rapid  running, personal hopelessness, brilliantly choreographed fights  and sly cultural jokes:  you have to love it when a character who’s escaped from being trapped in a washing-machine says he’s still “a little giddy from the revolution” . The Soviets nod, aren’t we all..

      Enough.  It’s wonderful.  Mischief at their best, as finely worked as clockwork and exuberant as toddlers.   

delfontmackintosh.co.uk.  to 5 Sept

Rating 5 

HOME AND FAMILY, BEAUTY AND SADNESS

 Few days late to the party with this , poor old theatrecat having seemed to fall off the press list;  but very well worth the ticket (Old Vic pricing is exemplary).   It’s by Conor McPherson, whose 1930’s  musical play round Dylan songs,  “Girl from the North Country” will be more than welcome back this summer.  This –   with only odd musical fragments – has much of the same haunting and humane spirit, tuned to the poetry, absurdity, tragedy and beauty of hardscrabble  lives.   Echoes  of Uncle Vanya have been much pointed at – country farmhouse, richer townie relative calling, money- talk threatening a serene resigned dullness, and 1980s Ireland not so different to Russia a century earlier. 

  But for me it felt far closer to JERUSALEM in tone,  thought, and its  memorable soliloquies.  

      Both exist in the wildlands between rough-cast lives and the edges of eternity: folklore and spirituality,  bewildered needs and  half-glimpsed otherworlds. Two siblings scruffily share the rundown family farmhouse:  Brian Gleeson’ s weary resigned Stephen,  and Billy , played with extraordinary conviction by Rosie Sheehy as a sibling somewhere on the autistic spectrum. She’s clever,  but needs an eye kept on her, and is soothed by lists and categories (the play opens with her  encyclopaedic lost of line changes from Limerick Junction  to Varanasi) . She is  at risk always of either disoriented explosions or lethally tactless statements of truth. 

    Lydia (Hannah Morrish) is  married to the third sibling Dermot and , riven by his “wandering” and his new young woman, has left her children at home to make a special tea and cake at the old farmhouse for visit from Uncle Pierre, a retired, blind and not reputable old priest, and the housekeeper Elizabeth with whom he lives. Another sibling Dermot -who runs cafes – is driving him up:  Chris O’Dowd plays quite beautifully as the ultimate  prosperous eejit, absurdly  preening, excusing his marital wandering withlines like  “Its the 1980s! , free market out there!  Let’s deregulate that momma!”.  Accompanied by a young employee “assistant” Freya.   Dermot is disconcerted to find Lydia  laying out the sandwiches,  sad and needy for his love. She has asked Stephen to get her water from a magical bogland spring as a love potion.   Sean McGinley as ancient Pierre taps around with his white stick and repeatedly offers to say Mass. 

   His housekeeper Elizabeth was once an item with Stephen,  whose resigned coping defeatism she clearly sees.  Her life with the priest seems to be a relationship based on tin baths in the kitchen , tending a graphically nasty tumour or wound,  and, as Stephen drily points out, the arrival of regular letters of remonstrance from  the Vatican.  The priest been banned from his overkeen delivering of the Last Rites. 

       The first half sets these people up and makes us exasperatedly or anxiously fond of them (that’s McPherson’s forte).  The second heats and speeds up:   no spoilers,  but it may be that the ancient priest  is both  a spiritual and a financial menace,   and that Dermot’s terrible behaviour is needy more than predatory, as he cries  old adulterer’s “bigger than both of us” excuse  that there are two roads but one can take him all the way to the moon.  O’Dowd’s scene with Morrish is wrenching, outclassed only by Pierre’s visions and , when all is resolved about the farm, Billy’s great and moving prediction of how she and her brother will end. 

      Reading about it, I had quailed slighly at the fact that Billy is labelled as autistic, because I feared empty fashionabless. But no: dramatically the presence of a wild card, unclassifiable, eccentric but real , suddenly distressable,  free from  normal social responses and seeking comfort in lists and hard facts adds both comedy and poignancy to the interlocked family plot.   A womderful line from her  to Elizabeth, after the fox gets the family chickens in a thunderstorm, is  that a person can be either a fox or a prize heifer.    The heifer is tied to a stick,  so everyone can walk roumd and  prod and see all of her, no secrets,  from bum and nose to udders. Whereas a  fox rampages in the dark, unseen, not known.   Which is better? 

      And a good  irony is that it is Lydia and Stephen who are most used to her, easy with her strangeness, and it is they who are the most centred and sane . It is a remarkable play. Looking back, in the thoughtful mood it left me, it is odd to remember how many, many laughs there were in it. That’s an achievement that won the fifth mouse.

Oldvictheatre.com.  To 14 June

Rating 5

AFFLUENZA APOCALYPSE 

     As Aubrey de Mandeville puts it in the great Antrobus books, “God, here’s a strange lozenge-shaped affair!”   Buñuel meets Monty Python,  courtesy of the immortal Sondheim in his Assassins mood. Had to be seen.  Hard to forget. 

        Stephen Sondheim’s last work – lovingly finished after his death by his collaborator David Ives, and directed by Joe Mantello with fervent love –  is based partly on Bunuel’s surreal satire “The Discreet charm of the Bourgeoisie” , and his avenging-angel fantasy film about the super-rich.  But don’t  worry, most if it is  roaring good fun:   a vengeful parable in which the world’s insouciantly pampered rich  try to meet up for brunch,   say ridiculous things (Marinne is having her dog cloned because it’s such a faff moving it from Connecticut to Switzerland and the Maldives so she needs one in each home).   The group of five get thwarted  in comic sequence and,  tellingly, in ways more familiar to the world’s poorest, like wanting a simple drink of water and not getting it, or having a  meal interrupted  by the abrupt arrival of the military. 

          Our antiheroes are Leo the hedgefunder and his daffily optimistic  wife Marianne (Rory Kinnear and Jane Krakowski, who gets the loveliest tunes and wears a negligée throighout). Then there’s Paolo Szot as a Latino ambassador, Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a cosmetic surgeon snd his showbiz agent partner (Martha Plimpton), plus  Marianne’s angry teenage sister Fritz, who wants a Communist revolution or, preferably, the end of the world.

       The first half is pure fun: greeted at The Everything Cafe with a cooing “your enabler will be here momentarily” the five are offered a vast menu but immediately met with a magnificently operatic aria from the waiter about how everything is off tonight. He then shoots himself, and obviously they don’t care.    On to the Bistro a la mode (“French deconstructionist” cuisine)  where the same happens only in a higher register and with a corpse in tthe private-dining room.   Then to the Osteria where a Colonel from Homeland Security arrives, complete with a squaddie who falls for leftie Fritz.  Still no food , so on to the magnificently gilded Embassy with Ambassador Santicci,  where rhey encounter a bishop in full rig who’s gone off God  – what with all the famines  and suffering  – and wonders if any of them can give him a job (that’s funny, the super-rich are always surrounded by people wanting jobs).  There’s  a ponytailed English butler called Windsor, who I think may be Satan. Or not.   

      That’s all in  a remarkably grand set by David Zinn,   gilt curlicues,  leatherbound books and panelling.  In this our delighted guests finally eat and are seen disposed, as Act2 begins, for all the world like a 17c court painting. Oh yes, the references here here to be truffled-for by the cognoscenti while vastly amusing the masses. Good old Sondheim.  As for the songs,  which fade out early in the second half,  they’re just as we expected and desired of the master: hyperliterate blasts of rapid wit rising occasionally to an exhilarating shriek. 

        But the point is the rich people can’t get out. Repeatedly the fourth wall, like a force-field,  sees them starting to leave the sumptuous scene  and failing; they settle down for a sleepover , flopped around like teenagers;. There’s a fabulous dream sequence where a certain monster gives Krakowski the last big romatic moment of the show (she’s a treat all through, crooning “I like things to shine, I like things to glow” and fondling the velvet upholstery). And in the morning gradually the reality of the trap comes over all of them . A bit too gradually, tbh:   an hour or so later my straw poll of scuttlers in the Jubilee line jnderpass agreed that Sondheim himself, who rarely outstayed his welcome,  would have taken some sharp scissors to the second half. 

           But we all enjoyed  a hellscape of sound, flashing lights, uneasy choreography, and brief love passages between Fritz and the squaddie ; it keeps the action going as they drink out of the flower vase and make kindling of the furniture. And there may have been a moment of real profundity at one point between the bishop and Marianne.  Or possibly not.   Jean-Paul Sartre seeped to  into the creation too,   to keep Bunuel company: “hell is other people”,   Huis Clos,  all that.    And hell, we’ve all been in parties when we yearned to get out.  But I did enjoy Kinnear the hedge-funder’s rant at trust-fund young Fritz,   saying that her radicalism was just like her fabourite burgers, “pink around the edges” . 

nationaltheatre.org.uk   to  28 June 

rating 3 . Really wanted to say 4 because , dear Sondheim. But honestly…

 A MODERN CLASSIC DONE WITH VIGOUR

  Michael Frayn’s play-about-actors is always welcome: a comic masterpiece and loving study in theatre’s own absurdity. The first act shows a final limping rehearsal for a hackneyed trouser-dropping farce;  the second a view from backstage halfway through the tour as we hear the play continuing while watching the cast’s jealousies and inadequacies creating mimed fury, mutual sabotage , violence and desperation to keep the whisky bottle and the oldest veteran apart.  The third  act is back onstage for a last performance which dissolves into helpless confusion. 

        Its brilliance lies both in satirizing its own profession and in the remorseless rhythm of returning lines and rising hoplessness.  The challenge of turning round the set – twice – is especially fascinating in Douglas RIntoul’s  touring production: it’s  in partnership with Hornchurch, Theatre by the Lake and Théatres de la Ville de Luxembourgwhose Clio Van Aerde has created some clever movable sets:  without a curtain the audience very much enjoyed watching high-efficiency stagehands hauling it all around, twice. 

    Altogether it is considerable fun,   handling all the physical jokes beautifully – George Kemp’s tied-shoelace and downstairs tumble positively heroic – and Russell Richardson’s drunken old ham Selsden is a joy.  But they’re all absolutely on-point and fearless.   And goodness, in this play they have to be.  

newwolseytheatre.co.uk  to 24 may  

TOURING:

Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch from Wednesday 28 May – Saturday 7 June 

 Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg from Friday 13 – Sunday 15 June

 Theatre by the Lake from Wednesday 25 June – Saturday 26 July

      A SATIRICAL WARNING FROM OLD UKRAINE

      Not long ago a rompingly funny version of Gogol’s satire on official incompetence ran at Marylebone ( https://theatrecat.com/2024/05/09/the-government-inspector-marylebone-theatre-nw1/).    That version was by Patrick Myles, and semi-updated to  a Ruritanian-Dickensian mashup with names like Fopdoodle: good fun , a timeless lark about mistaken identity and the panicking and fawning of corrupt bureaucrats.   Interesting now to see what that most scholarly of directors, Greg Doran, would do with Phil Porter’s new version.  He tells  a great story about how the young  Ukrainian civil servant Gogol got to St Petersburg, hated his lowly work, asked the great Pushkin for a good idea for a comedy and was told about a chap once mistaken for a government inspector.   Bingo! Writes it in two weeks, knows the official censor is likely to ban  it but Tsar Nicholas speaks up for it.  But the theatre is disgusted to have a 26 year old’s debut foisted on it, and does it all wrong, so Gogol walks out furious. 

          A fantastic origin-story,  and Doran has deliberately set it in the right period, 1936, so Gogol’s ghost may turn up at Chichester and be happier. It’s fitting to take a bow to Ukraine’s old identity, separate from mere Russia: in the programme we learn that a letter from Professor Torkut about his cultural importance only just arrived in time here because she was running around between missile strikes, caring for her granddaughter… .  

     So how does it feel? Well,  beautiful to look at, with Francis o’Connor’s dollshouse evocation of old rural Ukraine and some delightfully barmy details,  both in costume and in a stage ringed with  boxes of chaotic administrative old documents, finely detailed.   Lloyd Hutchinson as the Mayor and his troop of corrupt, idle local bureaucrats set the scene vigorously (the two little Dobchinskys very funny),  and then an elegant garret slides onto the stage  so we can meet Khlestakov,  the feckless gambler who will  accidentally – and then purposely – con the community.  

        There’s some fine broad shouty comedy and an excellent collapsing skylight and bed,  but unease hit me in Khlestakov’s  bullying brutality to his servant Osip,  and accelerated through his long, crazy drunken bragging scene.    Tom Rosenthal (beloved as one of the fighting brothers in TV’s Friday Night Dinners) does this with such unrestrained, un-nuanced shoutiness that I started hating it.  But then reflected that maybe we need to wince at it: for this is not only 190 years ago but part of a Russian-Ukrainian comic culture,  closer to our own bear-baiting and prizefighting period than to modern comedy, or the dry British allusiveness we are used to.      So maybe it’s only right to play it so broad:  Khlestakov’s  a lout, not a Lib-Dem councillor,  and his bureaucrat victims deserve no better.    And you can’t hate for more than the odd minute, because the stage is intermittently enlivened –  as it was earlier as we settled down,  worth being early for this show –   by three live musicians in folk costume playing Ukrainian song tunes. 

      So I trusted, and in the second half the pattern resolved:  one by one the undeserving officials were rinsed of their roubles as “loans” to the supposed grandee,  but then in a sharper, darker sequence the local shopkeepers came to beg him to get them justice,  and two women, one showing stripes of a public flogging by the brutal Mayor, make their plea to the startled interloper.   The women,   Shereener Browne and Leigh Quinn,  are strikingly good, and set nicely against the overdressed Mayor’s daughter,  (Laurie Ogden) and her mother,   who is Sylvestra le Touzel:   unbeatable,  especially when she goes full Hyacinth Bouquet at the idea that they’ll all move to St Petersburg.

       THere’ is, a sudden coup de theatre as the faker  risks understanding the reality of the people’s suffering:  Rosenthal stiffens, the light seems to dim, as heads and pleading hands appear above and around the  wooden carved city behind him.  But he stiffens himself against compassion and  gets a magnificent laugh – there are far more by now – with his seducer’s indecision about the women: “What’s it to be – the frisky young foal or the randy old honey-badger?”.     The community congratulations at the fake engagement create a lovely ensemble tableau,  moving of course to the  final moment of discovery and humiliation and mutual blame ,    and the Mayor’s startling rant.   Gogol’s angry message breaks the fourth wall to tell us how the world is full of con-men and gulls,  us  out here included, with our glasses of theatre-bar wine and easy laughing acceptance.

      And when the real Government Inspector arrives,  a proper shock:  Doran keeps his cast frozen still as statues for over a minute in dead silence,  a living Rembrandt portrait,  to make us think.    Then blackout, curtain call and final enlivening folk- music from the trio.   At which moment  it felt as if  the early discomfort of the datedly broad early brutality had been deliberate,  to share with us across centuries and cultures the universal , recognizable, regrettable evidence of what fools we mortals be…

cft.org.uk  to 24 May

rating 4