Review: A Government Inspector

A Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol
Bell Shakespeare
Sydney Opera House

Full-text version of review published in The Daily Telegraph.

In the best of Russian circus tradition, Bell Shakespeare’s production of A Government Inspector opens to the familiar sound of Eastern European music with that edge of crazy Gypsy tunes. An enormous box in the form of a parcel slowly opens to reveal the office of a provincial town clerk (Darren Gilshenan).

In he walks to find the light not working and the Chaplin-esque comedy that follows is merely a taste of the antics that Gilshenan and his co-star William Zappa hurl themselves at. Between the two of them they play twenty different roles in a play that Nikolai Gogol famously wrote over 160 years ago as a send up of corrupt Tsarist Russia.

Khlestakov (Gilshenan), an imprudent and lowly civil servant from St Petersburg is travelling around the country with barely a ruble to his name and living off the generosity of every inn-keeper in the land.

At the same time the Mayor (Zappa) of the town receives a letter advising him of the imminent arrival of a Government Inspector and panic sets in the corrupt officials who fear that their shoddy ways will be exposed.

Khlestakov, as you’ve already guessed, gets mistaken as the inspector and he enjoys the fruits of hospitality and a conga-line of official bribes.

The duo of Gilshenan and Zappa work tirelessly, performing all the roles on a set that has more tricks and sliding doors than a magician’s box. They change in an out of an array of costumes, adorn themselves with wigs, moustaches and glasses and the farce they produce is at times hilarious.

But the comedy on its own just doesn’t last the distance. The director John Bell has thrown out the 'tomb-like' inner core of the piece that is a hallmark of Russian theatre and only presented the razzle-dazzle of the characters. In Russian theatre no character is one-dimensional, no plot is simple and the humanity and dour Eastern European tendencies are always simmering beneath whatever they do.

By the time that the real Government Inspector arrives at the end, the force of the humiliation of the town officials is more of a whimper than the dreadful scenario it could be. Every circus has the dark and mysterious clowns, but this one is just a little too light to fully deliver.