The Government Inspector (Nikolai Gogol) at Merrist Wood, Guildford (17 - 20 July 2019) and touring to the Minack Theatre, Cornwall, 26 - 30 August 2019

Open Air Theatre by the Guildburys

This fast-paced comedy is another triumph for the Guildburys – brilliant individual and ensemble acting and wonderful comic timing.

Ian Nichols and the Guildburys continue their record of choosing high quality, brilliantly entertaining plays for their summer season of open-air theatre. Alistair Beaton's adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector still carries a punch today, 180 years after it was first staged in Tsar Nicolas I's authoritarian Russia. Civil servants and provincial officials are mercilessly lampooned, to hilarious effect. Satirical, farcical and cynical, it was nevertheless read and admired by the Tsar himself.

The story has no heroes. Khlestakov is a foppish, conceited young man who is travelling Russia with his servant Osip, wasting his father's money, gambling and drinking. They find themselves stranded in a town inn, without money or credit. The Mayor of the town is seized by the idea that this stranger is a high-ranking inspector from central government, come to find out what he and his deputies have been doing. He is fully aware that he is guilty of extortion, wasting public funds and mistreating the townspeople he should be serving,  The Postmistress, Commissioner for Health, Magistrate, Superintendent of Police, Director of Education and Doctor are equally terrified. To protect them all, the Mayor insists that Khlestakov and Osip stay with his own family, plies Khlestakov with vodka and flatters him until he feels so important that he almost believes that he is indeed a powerful man from Petersburg. He's quick to realise the opportunities for making money, too, accepting "loans" that the guilty dignitories offer him (all except the Superintendent of Police who has his standards to keep up – he only takes bribes, never gives them!) The dénouement is a masterpiece of comic choreography: I won't spoil it by revealing all.

The set is a splendid platform for the organised mayhem that the cast of almost thirty bring to it. We laughed continuously as Robert Sheppard, Tim Brown, Gilly Fick, Dave Ufton, Howard Benbrook, and Diane Nichols, the town dignitaries, cringed and crawled in terror to the so-called Government Inspector. Robert Sheppard as the Mayor brilliantly plays the part of a small man misusing power, with threat and bluster alternating with oily obsequiousness. His denial that he had flogged a townswoman brought the house down: 'She flogged herself!' 

Jason Orbaum as Khlestakov portrayed a weak, delusional fantasist and made him very comic, somewhat in the style of John Clease, I thought. Laura Sheppard and Issy Arnett, playing the Mayor's wife and daughter, who both flirted and were wooed by him, were painfully funny. Graham Russell-Price, as Osip, earthily played the most 'normal' of the characters – a rascal but a man with his feet firmly on the ground. I also enjoyed the performances of Paul Baverstock and Eddie Woolrich as Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern duo. 

We laugh delightedly at the jokes and wonderful clowning. But we also hear subtle echoes of the threat of the collapse of responsible government and shortage of honest, reliable leaders on a national scale, today.

Photos by Phill Griffith

This review was first published in Essential Surey Magazine https://www.essentialsurrey.co.uk/events/the-government-inspector-review/