The Government Inspector: Gorgeous to look at, but where's the rottenness?

Telegraph

02-05-2025

Long before Stalin, there existed in Tsarist Russia a trickle-down terror. In considering his 1836 comic masterpiece of mistaken identity – in which Khlestakov, a hard-up visitor to a provincial backwater is taken to be an undercover government inspector and treated like a king – Nikolai Gogol remarked: 'I tried to gather in one heap all that was bad in Russia. I wished to turn it all into ridicule. The real impression produced was that of fear…'
It's hardly the worst time to be placing a vision of Russian folly and grasping venality on a regional main stage, and if a director gets the balance right between domino-effect mayhem and a hierarchy of domination, then in theory you get the best of both worlds: an evening fit to have you clutching your sides, while delivering a punch to the guts about stupidity, self-interest and the herd instinct. Attending the premiere, the Tsar himself – Nicholas I – waved it through, which shows not its inoffensiveness but its guile in slipping an indictment of power abuse past the noses of officialdom.
Stepping back into the directorial fray after his esteemed tenure running the RSC, and capably opening Chichester's summer season, Gregory Doran almost hits the mark, but doesn't quite. There's a thin line between catching the way a shared misapprehension becomes a grinding mechanism ensnaring everyone, and parading a gallery of grotesques going through the motions of helpless frenzy.
Despite the evident, even strenuous, effort applied across the board, the rottenness Gogol was striving to anatomise feels decorous. Keeping the play in period is fine (albeit you could 'Putinise' the piece, and Doran has written an interesting programme note about the battle over Gogol's Ukrainian identity). The fidelity does mean, though, that we're in a world of amiable between-scenes folk-music, frock-coats and large boots, and an opulent, absurdist set (by Francis O'Connor) that makes overflowing filing cabinets part of a picturesque townscape.
The company deliver energetic, larger-than-life performances that serve well to fill Chichester's capacious auditorium; what's less apparent is a sense of inner-life – of panic and hysteria rising from deep within. Only in the second half, when a townswoman petitions the newly influential Khlestakov for redress against mayoral abuse, and bears the scars of a whipping, does a brutal reality manifest.
Taking on a role played in the past by Tony Hancock and Michael Sheen (and 20 years ago, in Chichester, by Alistair McGowan), Friday Night Dinner's Tom Rosenthal sports a nicely disbelieving demeanour as the suddenly fêted and hastily freeloading ne'er-do-well, taking relish in Phil Porter's springy adaptation ('He'd sell his own granny for two roubles and a half-sucked sweetie'). There's robust work on all sides – whether it be Lloyd Hutchinson as the pompous mayor, or Miltos Yerolemou and Paul Rider as a delightful double-act (Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky), redolent of a Tsar-era Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
I laughed a fair bit and acknowledged the audience merriment around me. Did I feel I was in the presence of a gold-plated, cleverer-than-it-seems classic, though? Not really.