Government Inspector
Government Inspector is a play which demands outsize performances and David Harrower’s
lively colloquial version of Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 comic satire certainly
delivers in Richard Jones’ often surreal production.
The audience enters Gogol’s world of corrupt bureaucrats via a snaking
corridor, passing a card game and a potato-peeling serf along the way.
Once
through the door, designer Miriam Buether gives us the acid-toned abode of
the troubled Mayor of a provincial backwater.
Rumour has it that a government inspector, travelling incognito, is on his
way, and the burghers who’ve been lining their own pockets – the judge, the
school superintendent, the head of hospitals, and the postmaster (a
cross-dressed Amanda Lawrence with a toothbrush moustache and the inability
to deliver any letter unopened) – are, to put it mildly, worried.
What follows in Government Inspector is a farcical spiral of mistaken identity when they wrongly
assume that Khlestakov (an impecunious clerk who’s gambled away all his
money and can’t even settle his bill at the local inn) is the feared
official.
Plied with bribes, fought over by both the Mayor’s wife (Doon Mackichan in a
jewelled turquoise lampshade of a dress) and their nubile daughter, he’s
treated like royalty – and Kyle Soller’s manic Khlestakov, with his shock of
red hair, laps it all up with increasing glee.
There’s nothing subtle about this manic production. The pace rarely
slackens, rats appear in the doorway, and Julian Barratt (of TV’s The Mighty
Boosh) is both panicked and sinister as the Mayor at the heart of the
corruption.
4/5
Young Vic, The Cut, SE1 8LZ
Tube Southwark / Waterloo
0207 922 2922
youngvic.org
Until 9th July
£10.00 – £29.50
– Louise Kingsley
