Review of a new production starring Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Dan Skinner and Martha Howe-Douglas

You can see why a ludicrous satire set in a broken regime of privileged, corrupt idiots might be considered topical… but there’s barely been a time since Nikolai Gogol penned The Government Inspector in 1836 that it hasn’t.

Broad swipes at establishment sleaze are overlaid onto an even broader farce based on that most dependable of plot devices: mistaken identity. When the venal buffoons running a provincial outpost hear that a government inspector is in town, they leap to the conclusion that the stranger running up a vast bill in the local inn must be him, not the wastrel gambler he really is. Chaos and misunderstandings naturally ensue.

All subtlety goes out the window, at least in this new adaptation by Patrick Myles, with its brash caricatures all shouting their comic intentions too loudly. Cartoonish performances are all dialled up to fever pitch even before we start, leaving nowhere for them to build towards. Lines are lost in the excitable gabble, and side characters literally fall to the floor with the shock of hearing bad news. It’s all very over-the-top, but rarely in a good way.

For this new version at London’s Marylebone Theatre, the action is transported from 19th Century Russia to the Victorian Britain of countless period dramas, with the characters given ornate Blackadder-style names.

Dan Skinner, aka Shooting Stars’ Angelos Epithemiou, is Governor Swashprattle, the tinpot dictator in a small pond, dressed in his extravagant braided uniform straining with unearned medals. He rages magnificently, especially in a tour-de-force of comic anger at the climax. But he only has two speeds here: that and obsequiousness in the presence of the visitor he wrongly assumes to be influential.

The characterisation is one-dimensional to the point we don’t believe that he or his myriad lackeys are real people who might have anything to lose from being exposed. Nor is there any wider sense of normality around which the madness might be centred. Everyone’s full-on, almost all of the time, which overwhelms the natural comic instincts of the stars.

Martha Howe-Douglas – who stepped in for an indisposed Vicki Pepperdine at short notice – does what she can with the limited role of his bourgeois social-climbing (and Brummie-accented wife) Anna. And as the visiting Percy Fopdoodle, her Ghosts co-star Kiell Smith-Bynoe makes for an amusingly foppish, entitled drunk with occasional flashes of physical comedy skills – at least when Myles’s full-throttle direction allows him the space to do so in the less frenetic second half.  

Otherwise, only Daniel Millar, as Fopdoodle’s cynical valet, is allowed to underplay his role while everyone else is at full, try-hard pelt. Occasionally it works – with Chaya Gupta as governor’s daughter Connie, amusingly thrown around the set as if an inanimate prop and Peter Clements and Dan Starkey as the two Ivans, more traditional buffoon-type characters, offering some tight musical-hall style crosstalk. But, tellingly, these are side characters. When the leads’ comedy is so heavily emphasised, it feels like hard work.

Occasional jibes at semi-current events have been slipped into the script, along with plenty of old-school double entendres. A clergymen’s supposed mission is to ‘spiritually level up’ the populace, there’s a reference to a dodgy politician handing a lucrative contract to their unqualified pub landlord, and gold wallpaper hangs in the ruler’s residence  – though you’d barely call any of this biting.

It wouldn’t matter if we felt engrossed in the farce, but – pre-interval, especially – the action is too maniacally incredible to buy into.

Review date: 9 May 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett