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by Nikolai Gogol, adapted and directed by Morris Panych

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

January 23-March 25, 2006

Out of respect Soulpepper should remove Nikolai Gogol’s name as author of The Government Inspector.  All that’s left of the 1836 Russian comedy is a bare skeleton, the rest eaten away by a malignant tumour named Morris Panych.  Panych’s adaptation does involve a small town paralyzed with fear when it hears a government inspector will appear incognito, and it does show the town officials mistake a nobody named Khlestakov (Diego Matamoros) staying at the local inn as the inspector and shower him with bribes.  But that’s it.  Otherwise, Panych has so filled the play with Canadian references (e.g., the Heritage Minister), and theatre in-jokes about Soulpepper, the new Young Centre, Our Town and, most annoyingly, himself, one wonders why he bothers with the Russian setting at all.

 

Panych has turned a great comedy about human nature into a slapstick farce that makes the Three Stooges look like Shakespeare with actors racing about the stage, bumping into each other and screaming their lines.  On its own Matamoros’s depiction of Khlestakov’s gradual descent into total inebriation is masterful, despite the fact that Panych seriously misrepresents the character.  With the Stratford Festival we already have a theatre company that dumbs down the classics.  Let’s not have Soulpepper start in on this, too.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2006-02-09.

Photo: Nancy Palk and Diego Matamoros.