You can see why, in 2024, one may revive Gogol’s play about rampant authorities corruption, and adaptor/director Patrick Myles asserts its topicality within the programme notes in addition to onstage. “You’re laughing at yourselves!” Dan Skinner’s puffed-up provincial governor howls at us, breaking the fourth wall in a pointed second close to the top. However are we? Every little thing onstage is so cartoonish, and the characters performed as such fools, it’s unlikely anybody’s sitting within the crowd pondering: “That’s me, that’s.”
Myles units the play in some hybrid of imperial Russia and Victorian/Edwardian England, a culturally unspecific world the place the gramophone exists, Dickens and Wilde are au courant, and “we might be despatched to London in chains!”, frets Skinner’s Swashprattle, aghast that the titular inspector may dob him in for graft. So he and his council of cronies brown-nose, bribe and grease their manner into their customer’s favour – little figuring out that Kiell Smith-Bynoe’s Fopdoodle isn’t any official, only a spoilt toff on the make.
Give or take a reference to gold wallpaper, the modern frisson is extra theoretical than precise. In truth, all of it feels old style, with its forged of dimwit northerners starry-eyed on the dream of London, some route-one jokes (“Oh I might like to see your balls …”), and its solely two feminine characters, Swashprattle’s spouse and daughter, solely centered on bagging a beau.
Lightness of contact is absent: it’s all performed very broadly for laughs, by Smith-Bynoe’s Ghosts co-star Martha Howe-Douglas because the social climbing spouse, and by Dan Starkey and Peter Clements as a cloth-cap double act memorably pegged by Governor Swashprattle as “Tweedledum and Tweedle-shit.”
A good few such Blackadder-like jokes hit dwelling, as do one or two selection visible gags. Skinner (higher referred to as Taking pictures Stars’ Angelos Epithemiou) does respectable work because the tinpot regional tyrant introduced low, doling out banknote after banknote to Fopdoodle’s cruel valet (Daniel Millar, whose deadpan offsets the theatrics elsewhere). Smith-Bynoe has enjoyable because the faux-inspector: half Bertie Wooster, half dissolute swindler. It’s performed as farce and is simply too effortful to drag that off, whereas Twenty first-century corruption – its methods and members – emerge unscathed.
