Lloyd Hutchinson is relishing the chance to play the villain of the piece on his Chichester debut – the Mayor in Phil Porter’s adaptation of The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol, the opening play this summer at Chichester Festival Theatre (April 25-May 24).

Famously it’s a tale of corruption… and mistaken identity. 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…

As Lloyd says: “The Mayor is great fun to play. He is so dastardly. He is bent and crooked and loud. He lies and he cheats and he doesn't pay for anything. He treats people with contempt. He is just this myriad bunch of dastardly traits that makes a good villain, and I think it's true in any drama that it is really fascinating to explore these darker sides to human nature. Somebody who is good and uncomplicated is not going to be as much fun to play as this guy who finds new levels of dodginess and duplicity.

“The whole joke is that the town he lives in is a hotbed of corruption and it's just in their DNA and has been for generations. Everyone is on the take. Everyone is dodgy. The school system is dodgy and the judicial system is dodgy, and that’s the point. Gogol can see that this is what Russian society is like and he just wanted to take a big stick to it. He's saying ‘You might think this is funny but this is your society, the society you are living in.’ There is the famous line ‘I don't know what you are laughing at but you are laughing at yourselves!’ And it was one of the first times in world drama that a character had stepped out of the play to say that kind of thing to an audience.”

And no, there is nothing to redeem him: “If he was a good man he would be trying to change things for the better but he doesn't desire that in any way.”

The show is Lloyd’s first time in Chichester though not his first Chichester show. He took over from Phil Daniels in Ian McKellen’s King Lear when the production went into the West End: “We did 100 shows in the West End and it was a really joyous time with a great company of actors.”

Lloyd’s Chichester run coincides with the release of the film The Salt Path: “We filmed that not last summer but the summer before down in Cornwall and it was a lovely job. Jason Isaacs’s and Gillian Anderson’s characters set out on the Salt Path and they bump into all these extraordinary people that help them to find some sort of perspective. I play this guy Harry that they meet who is walking with his very ill brother and he gives him a little life lesson about how the sea salt makes the raspberries taste differently.”

The filming seems a long time ago, and just the same with Mickey 17 in which Lloyd also appears: “It was filmed two and a half years ago and they delayed the film for a year after having made it. It was all about the marketing and finding the right time to release it.”