Review by Simon Jenner, April 30th 2025
Who inspects the inspectors? Not the custodians of power, certainly, as this season-opening production at the Chichester Festival proves with the 2025 programme being blasted open impressively.
Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz
Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 comedy The Government Inspector has been adapted at a healthy rate in the UK over the past 20 years. Unsurprisingly with such political corruption recently, we have had David Farr’s The UN Inspector in 2005 at the National, and notably Alistair Beaton’s the same year which was also at Chichester. Several since include Patrick Myles’s UK-themed satire at Marylebone Theatre last May. This one, 20 years after Beaton’s and adapted by RSC stalwart Phil Porter comes to Chichester under the direction of Greg Doran.
On one level it’s playful satire that takes Dickensian caricature to vodka levels: indeed Gogol read Dickens, and this informed his later work such as Dead Souls. But it’s peculiarly Gogol, peculiarly Ukrainian, in its zany proto-surreal humour with a glaring energy like no-one else’s. That is what we get here in Doran’s non-stop physical theatre version that is so tuned up it looks like early colour television; full of Dickensian exaggeration too. If it’s true, as Dostoevsky maintained, that all Russian writers emerged from Gogol’s overcoat, then Porter has stuck to 1836 here.
The first thing you notice is Francis O’Connor’s fairy tale set, dominated by great wooden doors and surrounded by Orthodox spires that light for night scenes in Emma Chapman’s ingenious methods of spreading and diffusing light. There are hidden doors too, an interior of sofas and desks, and a remarkable bed with a trap-window above it, down which tumbles a luckless twin of a Tweedledum and Tweedledee double act. Next, Paul Englishby’s generic (and upbeat) Ukrainian folk music is taken by violinist Corey Wickens, guitarist Benedict Wood and accordion player Moira Hartley, like everyone in period costume, contained neatly in gratifyingly clear sound design by Claire Windsor and Jonathan Ruddick. The trio’s repeat performances garner some of the loudest cheers of the evening.
It’s not just that Mike Ashcroft’s movement conveys superb moments like a near-comatose Inspector being carried out horizontally, but in a freeze-tableau at the end something more profound. Doran and Ashcroft have crafted a satirical ballet.
Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz
We enter this provincial Ukraine town and indeed exit on a shock. Lloyd Hutchinson’s Mayor browbeats or otherwise corrals his equally corrupt subordinates: a Government Inspector is reported to be staying at a local inn, and they will be found out. Hutchinson pomps and primps his way across the cast with a hint of one of those J. B. Priestley magnates about to get their comeuppance: indeed Priestley took a plot point from Gogol; you’ll guess which one after you’ve seen this.
Joe Dixon’s ex-military Judge puffs in a different way, with his badger-streak of white hair and regiment of funny walks as well as a passion to gift unwanted puppies (a touch of Python cruelty here too).
Oscar Pearce’s charity commissioner has a method NHS managers would envy: turf out the sick if you’re overcrowded and doctors will sign them off. Pearce’s sneers manage to render this snide official the worst of the lot, inadvertently out-Beadling Dickens.
Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz
Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz
Christopher Middleton is the aphasic, stuttering Head Of Schools: he might have heard of Demosthenes but forgets to take the pebbles out of his mouth though he is apparently handy with his fists in lessons. Middleton is as dry as a bundle of thwacking twigs. Reuben Johnson’s Postmaster is almost a relief: a mix of warmly naïve and naively corrupt, opening everyone’s mail which proves justified.
The “there is an inspector among us” rumour reaches the officials via that Tweedling duo of brothers, Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky played by Miltos Yerolemou and Paul Rider. One of them literally has a great fall. They’re quite startlingly twinned, differentiated by a brown-shift in clothing and berating each other for starting the peppery rumour mill. They perform miracles in Ashcroft’s comic movement, functioning as those Feydeau waiters who perennially get doors slammed in their faces.
This is how junior civil service clerk Khlestakov crashes into their world and onto that apparating bed. Arrogant, always on tick, he has run out of tock. Penniless, berating servant and innkeeper, he’s been given a chair leg as main course. Tom Rosenthal balances a winning charlatan with both a touch of Mr Ripley on the one hand and a chancer with a dash of warmth on the other.
Khlestakov actually grades his love interests as Plan A and B. In Laurie Ogden’s hands daughter Marya is an amorous, indeed eager young woman without guile, guilt or gifts. Provincially starved of Khlestakov’s St Petersburg manners, she’s a peach to be plucked, eaten and probably spat out.
Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz
Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz
Even Yerolemou and Rider though are outbid in sheer comedic verve by Osip, Khlestakov’s servant. Like the Dromio twins in The Comedy if Errors, Osip performs a mix of cunning, exasperation and riding blows. Nick Haverson’s a wily, whining mix of Sancho Panza and Baldrick. He’s the standout of the evening.
Shereener Browne both as the Locksmith’s and Charity Commissioner’s Wife deploys a West Indies broadside in two speeches: fun, if fantastical. The two Constables Scott Bowden and John Rogers have to be different to the Police Commissioner; they are both Keystone acts who fall over themselves.
As an ensemble piece, true to Gogol and in period, this could hardly be bettered. An outstanding and refreshing return to the original, this production takes Gogol on his own terms and does him homage by freeing his irreverence, his frightening extremes and the sheer amoral exhilaration that scandalized Russia and filled seats nightly.
This review first appeared in Plays International & Europe, to whom grateful acknowledgment is made for reproducing it here.
Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz
