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
theatreCat 