Chichester: Bringing Nikolai Gogol’s classic comedy to 21st century audience

“This one's got a cast of 18 people plus musicians and you've got a lot of people sitting there working out whether your jokes are any good! But the response was great,” Phil says. “And we've got a great cast. We've got Tom Rosenthal (Friday Night Dinner, Plebs, Manhood), and he is such a brilliant comic actor.”

The play is Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector in Phil’s new adaptation, the opening play in the Chichester Festival Theatre summer season, running on the main-house stage from Friday, April 25-Saturday, May 24.

In the piece, the bureaucrats in a remote provincial town are panicking. Word has gone round that a bigwig government inspector is heading their way. And things are far from ideal: for a start, the hospital’s hopeless, the post office has gone to pot, and the streets are filthy. The Mayor and the Judge are keen to brush their own indiscretions under the nearest carpet.

So when they discover the inspector is already staying at the inn, incognito, the whole town lavishes flattering attention on him. This suits ‘the inspector’ just fine, since in reality he’s a lowly and broke government pen-pusher, nursing extravagant fantasies of fame and fortune…

“It's a really exciting play to do,” Phil says. “I'm a big fan of stage comedy and historic stage comedy in particular. It was Chichester that approached me to do it last year. They had been talking to Gregory Doran (who directs it) about him doing something as his first big show since leaving the RSC and they decided on The Government Inspector. Gregory's late partner Sir Antony Sher had once been in it so maybe that's why they were thinking about it. But actually, in terms of big historical stage comedies, if you are looking to do something outside of Shakespeare, which I think Gregory was, there are not huge amounts of titles that you can actually do on a stage as big as Chichester's. And this one really works.

“I knew the piece from when I was a student. I probably read it. I'd never seen a professional production but I had seen a student production and it's such a thrill to work on a classic piece. I worked from a literal translation. They commissioned a translation that was basically translated blank. The translator didn't put their own spin or idiom on it. It was just a very factual translation that I could start from.”

And that gave Phil a degree of latitude: “The original production lasted four hours so my first job was just to get it down to a size that was acceptable to a modern audience. I think I got rid of probably something like 40 per cent but it is still set in Russia in the 1830s.”

And yes, there was discussion about possibly relocating it to now: “It does feel so relevant. You can see things in it that remind you of the British government now or what is going on in Russia now or even in my own parish council! But it just felt more fun to let the audience make their own associations and to stay with Russia at that time. I think audiences are always happier if they have to be a little bit more active and work things out for themselves. But personally I really enjoyed looking at Russian culture and looking up obscure Russian dishes that I could mention.”

As for the comedy, Phil says he was reminded a little of the balance of Dad’s Army “where you've got a bunch of brilliant character actors playing a bunch of brilliant characters and where you are offering lots of different versions of stupid. But obviously Gogol is a bit more sophisticated than that, and it also was a thrill to have a show where you have quite a lot of people on stage.”

Quite a lot of people on the stage behaving badly: “It's about these awful people that do whatever they have to do to cling on to whatever it is that they've got in life, and even the characters that are not outwardly unpleasant are still pretty self-serving. But it's such a good comedy that I think you come away with a great feeling of affection for these awful people just because they have made you laugh so much. The Mayor is a pretty awful character. He is a bully. He is very unpleasant to all the people that work beneath him. He is a thief and he is the most obsequious to the government inspector but actually at the end I almost found myself feeling sorry for him. I think in the play there is a warmth for humanity that we feel even while we are decrying the awful things that these people are doing!”