Government inspector? I hardly know ‘er! Those familiar with Gogol’s work via other translations or adaptations will be surprised to find this story transplanted from Imperial Russia into a farcical and fanciful imagining of Victorian England. Top hats tip, feathers flail, and breeches bust as the rambunctious set populating this unspecified vaguely historical small provincial town bob and blunder all over each other. There is no gag this cast is likely to sneer at with steady, practical stage violence, direct comic address to spectators, and even the launching of a cabbage into the melee all being paraded under the audience’s nose. The cynical heart of the play, although invoked in a couple of jarring directorial choices, never quite manages to fight its way to the surface of the burbling cesspool of crass comedic delights that this performance is swimming in.
Kiell Smith-Bynoe is simply delicious and deliciously simple as Percy Fopdoodle, a down on his luck and very much up on his privilege interloper into this small town’s politically pestilent directorate. Dan Skinner’s terrific and rather terrier-like Governor Swashprattle dominates the company and in fact the entire auditorium in the performance of his governance. When he and his ravenous pack of civil jackals mistake Fopdoodle for a foretold of “government inspector” they fall (and somersault and leapfrog) over themselves in an attempt to secure his goodwill, never suspecting that he is all too similar to their own sort and hasn’t a jot of goodwill more to give than they do. Even the governor’s ingenuous daughter, Miss Connie Swashprattle (Chaya Gupta) who falls harder and slaps more stick than all the rest combined (in a dizzyingly physical and extremely impressive performance) is irredeemably ignoble.
The company’s goofish machinations tumble forward at a breakneck pace and unfold as predictably ineffectively as Gogol’s story proves itself dependably funny. Much like the dastardly (if dastardy and stupidity can co-exist) Percy Fopdoodle, this play’s audience is spoon-fed its pleasurable morsels, and in such an environment can be entirely forgiven for neglecting to dig in to the text’s heavier themes.
Adaptor and director Patrick Myles’ ambitious project is well supported in its aims by set and costume designer Melanie Jane Brookes whose aesthetic sensibilities are tonally matched with the script itself in a perfect harmony. Particularly unsettling and furtively delightful is the inclusion of a bizarre mouse like figure in the visual language of the play that creeps about its margins and threatens to make a real piece of commentary out of it one of these days.
Playing until 15th June, https://www.marylebonetheatre.com/productions/the-government-inspector
Reviewer: Kira Daniels
Reviewed: 9th May 2024
North West End UK Rating: