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.
Give or take a reference to gold wallpaper, the contemporary frisson is more theoretical than actual. In fact, it all feels old-fashioned, with its cast of dimwit northerners starry-eyed at the dream of London, some route-one jokes (“Oh I would love to see your balls …”), and its only two female characters, Swashprattle’s wife and daughter, solely focused on bagging a beau.
Lightness of touch is absent: it’s all played very broadly for laughs, by Smith-Bynoe’s Ghosts co-star Martha Howe-Douglas as the social climbing wife, and by Dan Starkey and Peter Clements as a cloth-cap double act memorably pegged by Governor Swashprattle as “Tweedledum and Tweedle-shit.”
A fair few such Blackadder-like jokes hit home, as do one or two choice visual gags. Skinner (better known as Shooting Stars’ Angelos Epithemiou) does decent work as the tinpot regional tyrant brought low, doling out banknote after banknote to Fopdoodle’s merciless valet (Daniel Millar, whose deadpan offsets the theatrics elsewhere). Smith-Bynoe has fun as the faux-inspector: part Bertie Wooster, part dissolute swindler. It’s played as farce and is too effortful to pull that off, while 21st-century corruption – its systems and participants – emerge unscathed.
• At Marylebone theatre, London, until 15 June
