Latest news with #Gogol
Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Government Inspector review — a Gogol revival with slapstick
It's almost as if panto season has arrived early at Chichester Festival Theatre. Gregory Doran's revival of Gogol's comedy of mistaken identity and everyday graft in Tsarist Russia is brash, hectic and awash with old school slapstick. Phil Porter's fruity adaptation isn't afraid to toss in slivers of Carry On humour as well, nor can you help noticing that Sylvestra Le Touzel's lubricious mayor's wife speaks in the same suggestive tones as Mollie Sugden's department store harridan in the vintage sitcom Are You Being Served? The comedians Rik Mayall and Julian Barratt have been drafted in to spice up the central role in past productions. This time the honour falls to the stand-up comedian Tom Rosenthal, star of the TV shows Plebs and Friday Night
Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Government Inspector: Gorgeous to look at, but where's the rottenness?
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.
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Government Inspector review – Tom Rosenthal stirs up Gogol's political satire
A satire by a Ukrainian-born writer in which Russians trust a chancer who cruelly tricks them has obvious topicalities. The programme for Gregory Doran's revival of Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector (1836) includes a letter from a Ukrainian academic bemoaning Putin's attempts to claim Gogol as Russian, although the Kremlin dictator could not sit with any comfort through a play about the stupidity of rulers. Nor, though, could Donald Trump or most leaders. In a show premiered, deliberately or not, on local election day in England (May Day in Russia), Doran strongly brings out how power can be a confidence trick in which both sides consent. The citizens of a provincial Russian town submit to the authority of a penniless nincompoop because guilt at their corruption has led them to think they deserve him. But Khlestakov, who they falsely believe to be their governmental nemesis, finds, as unsuitable overlords often do, that he enjoys control. In our context, the play can also be seen quietly to question whether the reflex sending of inspectors – into schools, hospitals, prisons – is distraction rather than action. However, even Doran's signature swiftness, each speech pursuing the last, can't overcome the original's blunt structure. It has a setup of exemplary economy – the opening line announcing 'a government inspector is on the way' – but the subsequent misunderstandings are linear with no twists. And, of the corrupt town officials, only the Postmaster (brightly played by Reuben Johnson) behaves badly in a way that impacts the narrative. If only more were made of the Head of Schools, the Chief of Police or the Charity Commissioner, given their modern significance. Unfortunately, Phil Porter's adaptation always favours lighter jokes, such as anyone speaking a long Russian patronymic being blessed for sneezing. Khlestakov is an unusual central role in that the character is only on stage for the middle three of the five acts. That means the actor must satisfy anticipation with his entrance and leave a tangible gap after exiting. Achieving both, Tom Rosenthal brings the easy stage command of a practised standup to a performance of energetic inflections and physicality that suggests a route to Shakespearean and Restoration comedy clowns. Miltos Yerolemou and Paul Rider double-act nicely as Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, landowners as interchangeable as Rosencrantz and Tweedledee. But, for all the efforts of the director and cast, it made me want to see two later, darker plays that knowingly used Gogol: JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls and Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist. We now demand tougher inspection of government. At Chichester Festival theatre until 24 May
