The Government Inspector

The Government Inspector
By Simon Stone, with Emily Barclay; devised by the cast. Featuring a short musical by Stefan Gregory. Inspired by Nikolai Gogol. Belvoir. Mar 27 – May 18, 2014.

Actor Robert Menzies enters first with the true story – we are not seeing The Philadelphia Story as planned because the estate of a recently discovered co-writer withheld the rights. And, no doubt, objected to the radical reworking you’d expect director Simon Stone to inflict on that classic spoof of New York high society. 

And so the company instead is staging Gogol’s 1836 satire, The Inspector General.  But, says the lugubrious Menzies, we won’t actually be seeing that play either, since Stone has so radically jumbled it – and anyway, he’s left the production in a fit!

And so the curtain goes up on a group of agitated actors left stranded in one cancelled play and, on a slim tip, desperately googling for an allegedly Great Russian Director who’s a genius with Gogol.  

Enter Gareth Davies, as an unloved actor trying out for a Belvoir impro audition. When the other actors presume him to be the Great Russian Director – just as the corrupt villagers in Gogol’s play wrongly presumed an anonymous clerk to be the visiting Inspector General – this mash of a play truly begins.

Stone’s version is a play about play-acting, about playing to how people perceive us, yes, but still it’s all art about art. And that’s a smaller world of impact and importance (and a shrinking slight to Gogol). Almost all is forgiven however by the huge entertainment and hilariously in-house wit of this group- devised show (with writer Emily Barclay). 

The actors play hyped versions of themselves; it’s now all about them, their vanities, desperation, neediness, banter and joys. Mitchell Butel is typically mesmerising in his luvvy briskness; Greg Stone, angry but needy; Menzies, darkly misanthropic; Eryn Jean Norvill, played insecure and promiscuous; Fayssal Bazzi, ever accommodating; and Zahra Newman, beautiful if petulant. 

Newman also does a fine double as the theatre’s Latin cleaning lady who somehow writes the final musical version of Gogol – when the Russian Director and his Soviet avant-garde approach are both discarded. The expert skills of composer Stefan Gregory and choreographer Lucy Guerin deliver a  pretty good “bad musical”. 

Meanwhile, Ralph Myers’ simple set keeps revolving through backstage and onstage glimpses of the madness. Here again the production has much in common with the antics of the B grade theatre troupe featured in Michael Frayn’s classic comedy, Noises Off, just staged by the Sydney Theatre Company. 

The Inspector General had a more complicated, quicker and less original birth but it’s an inventive riot just the same. Just spare a thought for Gogol – and those who think they’ve just seen him.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Lisa Tomasetti.

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