The Government Inspector
Seattle Shakespeare Company, 2017
Adapted by Jeffery Hatcher from the original by Nikolai Gogol
Scenery by Julia Welch
Lighting by Andrew Smith
Costumes by Pete Rush
Sound by Evan Mosher and Rob Witmer
So maybe the Kremlin is hijacking our social media and messing with our elections. Yet just when we need a lift, a classic Russian farce that has kept people chortling since the 1830s returns to tickle us.
Want to cure someone of a case of slapstick-phobia? Seattle Shakespeare Company has just the remedy: a delirious rendering of “The Government Inspector,” Nikolai Gogol’s knockabout lampoon of Russian provincialism in particular and human foibles in general.
Staged with crafty aplomb by Allison Narver, and animated by a well-oiled cast of prized zanies, the show beckons us in with a ballet of mobile doors. Doors are a key element in any farce, and tumbling out of them in Julia Welch’s handy set design are Gogol’s perfect fools — a whole village of them.
Though “The Government Inspector” is a blithe romp, outfitted here with vivacious dances and Russian-esque music, its cynical outlook and exposé of grotesque corruption were scandalously realistic in Gogol’s day. Either Czar Nicholas I didn’t get the barbs, or was richly amused by them, when he championed the play and ensured its production.
By the way, this is the first Russian classic Seattle Shakespeare Company has presented. And if Narver’s work here is any indication, then come what may in international relations, it should not be the last.
A crass comedy of errors, The Government Inspector follows a group of meddling citizens in a backwater Russian town, who learn that a government inspector is set to visit them incognito and report back to the Czar. When two local men (Kevin Kelly and Arjun Pande) tell the mayor (a blustery Rob Burgess) that a mysterious man at the inn is surely the government inspector (he’s actually the rogue debtor Khlestakov, played by R. Hamilton Wright), it sets off a series of miscommunications, bribes and escalating ploys, as well as a twist that in hindsight should have been obvious but, if you’re like me and allow yourself to get completely wrapped up in comedic mishaps, comes as a delightful clincher in the final seconds of the play.
Narver directs her cast with lighting-quick timing—their physicality, both in interactions and in the body language that punctuates their speech and embodies their characters, is spot on and essential to pulling off this kind of work.