You can see why, in 2024, one might revive Gogol’s play about rampant government corruption, and adaptor/director Patrick Myles asserts its topicality in the programme notes as well as onstage. “You’re laughing at yourselves!” Dan Skinner’s puffed-up provincial governor howls at us, breaking the fourth wall in a pointed moment near the end. But are we? Everything onstage is so cartoonish, and the characters played as such fools, it’s unlikely anyone’s sitting in the crowd thinking: “That’s me, that is.”
Myles sets the play in some hybrid of imperial Russia and Victorian/Edwardian England, a culturally unspecific world where the gramophone exists, Dickens and Wilde are au courant, and “we could be sent to London in chains!”, frets Skinner’s Swashprattle, aghast that the titular inspector might dob him in for graft. So he and his council of cronies brown-nose, bribe and grease their way into their visitor’s favour – little knowing that Kiell Smith-Bynoe’s Fopdoodle is no official, just a spoilt toff on the make.
