The Writing of The Government Inspector
The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol
West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1996
Nikolai Gogol
In 1835 Gogol wrote imploringly to his friend and mentor Pushkin, “Take mercy on my and give me any kind of story, it doesn’t matter how funny or sad, just so long as it’s a purely Russian anecdote.” Pushkin duly obliged with the tale of how one evening at an inn in Nishny Novgorod he was mistaken for a high-ranking official from St Petersburg and feted well beyond his due.
At least, so the legend goes. It could have been that Pushkin simply invented the kind of fable he knew would appeal to his friend’s comic imagination as Gogol, though a comic stylist of distinction, could not conceive a plot to save his life. Certainly the anecdote is plausible in the context of the prevailing social hierarchy, which bound the country into a straitjacket as rigid as any Indian caste system. But even if Pushkin did invent it, such incidents are apt to occur in the kind of society that sets more store by the outward appearance of a uniform then the man inside it. (Eighty years later the German playwright Karl Zuckmayer would write The Captain from Köpenick based on an actual incident in 1906, when a cobbler dressed up as an army officer and for three days held the eponymous district of Berlin to ransom by sheer force of cheek and gall.)
Whatever the truth of Pushkin’s anecdote, Gogol’s imagination was fired. Calling on earlier works such as Kvitka’s comedy A Newcomer from the Capital (1827) and the even earlier 17th-century influences of the French classicists – Corneille’s Le Menteur (The Liar) and Molière to name but two – Gogol created his play within a matter of weeks. “If one is to laugh,” he commented, “then let us at least laugh at those things which deserve to be laughed at.” He pulled the satirical stops out because he knew he had little chance of seeing the play performed.
But it so happened that he had a friend, the poet Zhukovsky, who was tutor to the royal heir apparent. The poet showed the manuscripts to his pupil’s father, Nicholas I, and the Tsar was so impressed that he ordered the play to be put on at the Imperial Theatre, thereby sending a message to the censor that the work had received royal sanction. The first performance, incorporating just a few minor cuts, took place on 19 March 1836, and the Tsar remarked contentedly “Everyone gets his just deserts, me as much as anyone.”
Public opinion, however, was divided. The liberals in the audience liked it. Those the play set out to pillory didn’t. “A libellous farce,” was just one of the insults hurled at it by one Court spectator. It was denounced as unpatriotic and dangerous, for the inferred implication that corruption was endemic to the ruling classes. “Don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked,” Gogol retorted but, as always unusually sensitive to criticism, he was already making plans to get out while the going was good. Barely three months after the play had opened, he boarded a coach for Rome. “A comedy writer should live far from his country,” he explained airily, but in fact he had been as much phased by his adherents as by his enemies. The fans wasted little time in crying him up as a prophet of liberalism and democracy, a role he had neither the nerve nor the intention to adopt.
Besides, he was also falling prey to an overwhelming sense of melancholy -beztolkovshchina in Russian – at the senselessness and muddle he saw all around him. The Government Inspector had been his doomed response to it and, though it was to become much more successful later, it did not bring him the reassurance he needed now.
Towards the end of his life, having failed to come up with a text of the play that completely satisfied him, he wrote, “In The Government Inspector I tried to gather together into one lump all that was bad about Russia. I wanted to expose it all to ridicule. The real impression produced was one of fear. I have never laughed louder, with so much scorn, but through this laughter the spectator will feel my bitterness and sorrow.”
A NOTE ON THE RUSSIAN CIVIL SERVICE
Russia at the start of the 18th century was to all intents and purposes a vast medieval fiefdom. Peter the Great (1672–1725) resolved to drag it kicking and screaming into the modern world and flung open the doors to an influx of European influence. The latest ideas on art, technology, philosophy and science flooded in and in order to keep the ship of state afloat in the face of this tidal wave, the Tsar also introduced a civil service constructed along German lines.
The whole system was run from St Petersburg. There were fourteen grades of ranks, encompassing all levels of society. Only the most minor tradesmen and, of course, the serfs, were excluded.
Each of the ranks in public – and indeed ecclesiastical – life had their equivalents in the commissioned ranks of the army and navy. For example:
Mayor = Colonel
Postmaster = Lieutenant Colonel
Judge = Major
School Superintendent = Captain
Humble clerk Khlestakov, the (anti-?) hero of Gogol’s play, would have ranked with a cornet or ensign, in other words the lowest of the low.
Each rank had its own uniform, accoutrements and forms of address. The titles they carried bore absolutely no relation to the duties they undertook. Everyone knew exactly where he was and the only thing the various ranks had in common was the single overriding desire on the part of each individual member to claw his way further up the greasy pole by whatever means he could.
PREVIOUS INSPECTIONS
The play in performance
Timely when it was written, The Government Inspector has been topical ever since. The universal themes within the play allow it to withstand constant reinterpretation. Although Dostoievski is known to have played the Postmaster in an amateur production in 1860 – indicating that Gogol’s most famous play has always afforded opportunities for the tragedian as well as the farceur – The Government Inspector really came into its own in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. It was a reminder of the violence inflicted on the individual by a too-rigid application of the formalities of rank and a warning against what awaited any backsliding into the old ways.
On 3 February 1917 the Alexandrinski Theatre in Leningrad, its name now changed to the State Theatre of Drama, gave the first free performance of The Government Inspector to an audience of Red Guard soldiers and workers. The local newspaper the Petrograd Echo reported approvingly, “Productions such as the one given on Saturday are exhilarating, like a festival of rebirth,” and the play has been popular in the repertoire ever since.
Stanislavski’s version
The Moscow Art Theatre, famous amongst other things for giving Chekhov his big break, put on its first revival of The Government Inspector in 1921. Their 1908 production had been rich in naturalistic detail, recreating the squalor of provincial life right down to the bedbugs on the wall of the inn that Khlestakov squashes with his feet. But the new post-Revolution set, designed by the painter Konstantin Yuon, was determinedly bright and cheerful. This time the action moved at a lively lick and the message of the play was hammered home with compelling force when the Mayor delivered his final words “you are laughing at yourselves!” straight into the audience’s faces, his foot resting on the prompt shell, while the auditorium lights blazed full on.
Mikhail Chekhov played Khlestakov in a spirit of sprightly buffoonery, his spring-heeled acting style conveying the empty-headedness of a clown giddily raised beyond his station.
Meyerhold’s version
In complete contrast, Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1926 version at his own theatre in Moscow was a radical reworking of Gogol’s text which not only restored many traditional cuts but reinstated lines previously censored, and even episodes and fragments from other of the playwright’s works. In fact, Meyerhold carried out such a makeover on the play that he had himself billed on the posters as “author of the production”.
For him the play was a metaphor for Gogol’s entire epoch and his method was to clear away all the comic lampoonery in order to leave the tragic jugular exposed. First he moved the action from the provinces to the streets of a major metropolis. Next, he rigorously confined the acting area to a series of small sliding platforms or trucks which trundled ominously from the back of the stage all the way down to the footlights. (“The main scenes have been shot in close-up,” Meyerhold explained.) The set – again his own – was a lavish representation of Russian Empire Style, all brocade, porcelain and crystal. He wanted to point up the “‘swinishness’” in the striking and the beautiful, the ‘brutishness’ in all that is elegant and refined”. The effect was surreal and disconcerting but above all, despite the surface glamour, ultimately oppressive.
The character of Khlestakov as played by Erast Garin was no mere dunderhead making the most of a lucky chance but a clever manipulator, arrogant, unpredictable and dangerous. While the rest of the cast cowered before him only the Mayor’s women, the venal wife and the rapacious daughter, remained unafraid, their sensual desire for him growing at the same rate as his increasingly demonic stature.
The phantasmagorical character of the piece continued right up to the curtain: into the traditional mute scene at the end of the play Meyerhold smoothly dropped a series of life-size puppets posed in the same attitudes of frozen horror as the flesh and blood actors. The influential critic Lunacharsky wrote of this moment: “Meyerhold suddenly shows the terrifying automatism, the appalling lifelessness of the world portrayed by Gogol that is still alive in our midst,” and he went on to hail the “creation of a new realism”.
Yet the representation was so unusual and startling that it perplexed, bored and infuriated its spectators in equal parts. “You have murdered Gogol’s laughter!” cried one. The debate spread widely, provoking dozens of newspaper articles and generating at least three books. The fundamental question was: did Meyerhold have the right to update Gogol? Lunacharsky weighed in with an unequivocal yes. Great writers, he argued, were done little honour by being preserved in the aspic of museum conservatism. Meyerhold’s production was not simply anarchy for its own sake “but an attempt to break with tradition and provide a new, fresh version seen as if for the first time. This,” the critic concluded, “is the absolute right of any great artist.”
Terentiev’s version
While Meyerhold was reclaiming and reworking the classics in Moscow, ex-lawyer and ex-Futurist poet Igor Terentiev decided to give his own Government Inspector in Leningrad. He presided over a 200-seat auditorium, called the Journalists’ Club situated in the old Shuvalov Palace, and that same year, 1926, he staged a series of four plays which became notorious for their uncompromising and brutal naturalism. In open revolt against Meyerhold, Terentiev restored the play’s satire on gross provincialism, replaced Meyerhold’s gloomy fatalism with unrestrained slapstick, and shifted the spotlight away from the vapid Khlestakov and onto the stupid, libidinous and greedy figure of the Mayor.
The costumes, designed by pupils of the painter Pavel Filonov, were intended to announce the characters’ occupations, preoccupations and attitudes: thus the Postmaster’s uniform was made up of stamps and envelopes, the Doctor’s gown sported a skull and crossbones, the Police Officer was bedecked with handcuffs and shackles, and so on. In the event these costumes proved so intriguing that the audience tended to ignore the dialogue for long periods, so they soon had to be replaced with more conventional garb.
The set was stylised too, consisting of five large black cupboards open on one side, which could be easily moved about the stage. They helped emphasise the crude physical details Terentiev introduced: one stood for a WC into which the Mayor retreated during a bout of nervous diarrhoea, another represented a side room into which Khlestakov could drag first the Mayor’s wife then his daughter. The ending provided Terentiev in his turn with the opportunity for a memorable coup de théâtre when Khlestakov reappears among the petrified cast and reads over them, like a funeral oration, the playwright’s own character notes from the script.
All these innovations duly outraged public and critics alike. One accused Terentiev of reducing Gogol’s masterpiece to the level of “obscene bedroom farce”, another spoke of “wilful eccentricity”. Even Terentiev’s supporters were prompted to question the relevance of such extravagant experimentation. Nevertheless, the production was received better in Moscow than it had been in Leningrad, perhaps because in contrast to Meyerhold’s version it simply restored a level of Rabelaisian good humour and gusto that Meyerhold’s po-faced representation had so signally eschewed. It also, to its credit, played the text Gogol had written, and those parts of it which had been excised, reinstated or otherwise tampered with by Stanislavski and Meyerhold sounded fresh, clear and persuasive.
The Inspector in Britian
It was the Russian director Theodore Komisarjevski who first mounted notable productions of the play in this country, starting at the Duke of York’s in 1920 with Claude Rains, and then at the Barnes Theatre, Hammersmith in a 1926 revival. Komisarjevski, like Meyerhold, designed his own sets and costumes, but unlike his countryman was more concerned to bring out the underlying emotion of the text though strict observance of mood, atmosphere and rhythm.
More recently the work has attracted some of our biggest star names including Alec Guinness and Ian Richardson. Paul Scofield in the 1966 production directed by Peter Hall at the Aldwych played the part as a kind of ageing fop whose slightly faded glamour easily fooled the provincials through their lack of familiarity with the real thing. Here the piece was played as a broad bucolic farce on a set like a Russian doll’s house, all black varnished wood and garish colours.
In 1974 Richard Eyre directed Jonathan Pryce as Khlestakov at Nottingham Playhouse. This time the lowly clerk was transformed into a rough Glaswegian oaf striking terror into the hearts of a post-war Yorkshire backwater. It was Richard Eyre again who directed the National’s version on the Olivier stage in 1985, with Rik Mayall as his manic clerk in tonight’s very adaptation.
One of the most recent versions to draw striking parallels with the politics of the day was that put on by Dubbeljoint in Belfast in 1993. This company exits to create works which have relevance and appeal to people on both sides of the border, hence their name Dub(lin) Bel(fast) Joint, and for them The Government Inspector provided the comic opportunity to substitute Tsarist Russia for Ireland under British rule. Gogol’s Russian provincials in thrall to St Petersburg become a group of 19th-century Irishmen whose country is still wholly governed by Westminster, and for whom the notion of Partition would bring more problems than it solved.
The Government Inspector is 160 years old this year. Written at a specific time to satirise a specific condition – the spiritual sterility of a country whose hierarchical system has stifled humanity – Gogol’s masterpiece still finds its echoes today. The fact that The Government Inspector has lent itself to so many different presentations indicates why it will always be a key work in the repertoire. The text of a classic is never the last word: rather it is the starting point for the interpretation and personal vision successive generations of directors will wish to bring to it. “Don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked,” Gogol retorted to the critics who lambasted his most famous satire. “If we are to laugh, then let’s at least laugh at something that deserves to be mocked.” Laughing at ourselves isn’t always easy – but it’s always a healthy sign.
[click here for a biography of Nikolai Gogol]
PS
I like the way I talk about this play as if I knew the first thing about it. Never read it, never seen it, but after researching it for this piece, I feel I have. But then again, is that strictly true? I suppose the trick is to sound authoritative enough to gain the reader’s confidence. If only they knew…
I did come across one interesting echo: “Don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked” could well have been the kernel of my own character Blade’s line in his introductory address to the audience at the start of my spoof Restoration comedy The Double Beaux:
“Tis oft well said the business of the stage
Is first to hold a mirror to its age…”
The notion had always sounded vaguely familiar to me, and it was only on typing this piece up for the website, having barely given it a thought in nearly thirty years, that I realised where I must have got it from. Between you and me, I suspect it was only when I’d got to the end of The Double Beaux and realised it wasn’t about very much that I cast about for some kind of message and ended up tacking this rather dubious truism on at the end. As Blade takes his leave he says:
“And so our play is done, but since it’s art
Remember there’s a message at its heart.
Tis simply this: it’s best to play yourself
Since lech’ry may be harmful to your – er – healf.”
(It works in context.)
This may sound like a very artificial way of creating a script, but you’ve got to throw the would-be intellectuals a bone occasionally. They have so little imagination, and lead such intense, miserable lives, they can’t conceive that a comedy which sets out simply to delight can ever be enough in itself. “But what’s it saying?” they badger. “What’s it all about?” “It’s about forty pages long,” you reply, ensuring they will never take you seriously again.
Frankly I thought that’s what James Goldman was doing in the final moments of his otherwise spectacularly rich and rollicking script for The Lion in Winter. After all the cut and the thrust and the banter and the bluster, in the end it all had to be about something, so once all the royal family in-fighting is over, and the favourite son John has been done out of the throne, and Henry has finally had to suck it up and name Richard as his heir, and he realises he is going to have to send his beloved queen, the ever-feisty Eleanor, back to the Tower in case she raises another rebellion against him so the prince can come into his inheritance sooner rather than later, the old king finally has to face up to the truth. “Children,” he groans plaintively, “they’re all we have.” It’s not the land and the law and the power and the money at all, turns out it’s just been about them pesky kids all along. King, commoner, beggar or peasant, offspring are the one thing we all have in common. But we knew that. (As Richard himself says at one point, “Christ, Henry, is that all?”) Luckily, since Mr Goldman had taken the precaution of ravishing our ears with enough rip-roaring stuff across the previous two and half hours to drag us deep into his thrall, by the time we get to that point we are prepared to agree with anything he says… however self-evident it might have been before we even sat down. But for a while there, he sure had me fooled.