The Government Inspector
The Government Inspector, by Roger Pulvers adapted from Nikolai Gogol, Bell Shakespeare Company, Playhouse Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 26 October-24 November; ph: 9250 7777 or www.sydneyoperahouse.com
Apparently some potential theatre-goers have been put by the title of this Russian classic, believing that its plainness promises an evening of didactic medicine (awfully good for you but hard to take). What a pity! DO NOT BE PUT OFF!
The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol and first staged in 1836 in St Petersburg, was a wicked, sprawling, satirical comedy. Dozens of characters filled the stage with the petty worries and snobberies of small town Tsarist Russia as its august citizens frantically prepare for a visit by the high ranking official of the title.
Coincidentally (there always has to be a coincidence) just as the townsfolk are working themselves into a lather in preparation for the dreaded bureaucrat, a Mr Klestakov happens to arrive. He is an impoverished wastrel and accomplished ninny, but this doesn't stop everyone, from the Mayor down, believing he is the man with the power of life and death - and - improbably - the ear of the Tsar.
As is so often the case when an inspired comic/court jester has the nerve to hold up a mirror to his society, Gogol's play hugely amused Tsar Nicholas I who insisted it be staged at the Alexandrinsky Theatre. Consequently tout haute St Petersburg were able to laugh - nervously - as the Tsar guffawed at seeing himself and his court mercilessly lampooned, albeit by proxy.
Roger Pulvers has freshly translated and remade the play (it's more than mere adaptation) in an ingenious fashion by divvying up the most important characters, male and female, and engineering their entrances and exits so that just two actors take on the lot. This could be a close to impossible ask if the two were less accomplished than Darren Gilshenan and William Zappa.
Zappa is a fine actor who also has the timing of a Swiss watch when it comes to comedy; he slips seamlessly between 13 characters and makes a wonderfully grotesque bourgeois matron. Gilshenan is now, after his years honing his craft with Bell Shakespeare, one of the most inspired clowns of his generation. He has the loose-limbed, unselfconscious physicality of Michael Crawford, but none of the inane-wet-mincey qualities that made his Some Mothers character rather shuddery. Rather, Gilshenan is on the Buster Keaton side of comic genius: at home with the hilarity of silliness and pratfalls but with a casual, gentle manliness - even when his character is a prating fop as is the non-Government Inspector.
The setting - an office constructed of a large opening-closing cardboard box of the kind favoured by dreary clerks for the storing of important papers - is a spectacularly apposite idea by Stephen Curtis with lighting by Damien Cooper; plus gloriously madcap folksy oompah soundtrack by Alan John.
The play and the performances are among the most entertaining and clever we have seen in Sydney in a long while - not since Drew Forsythe's turn as The Venetian Twins of face-achingly funny memory. Comedy is particularly difficult to pull off because it must appear effortless - or it looks like hard work and is therefore a dismal failure.
Steered by director John Bell, Zappa and Gilshenan between them (not forgetting four hidden quick-change dresser assistants) manage one of the great nights of comedy theatre. It is silly as a wheel and took almost as long to invent. Treat yourself. But remember the play's epigraph: "If your face is crooked, don't blame the mirror."
