REVIEW: Riotously over-the-top fun as Government Inspector opens Chichester Festival Theatre summer

Throwing all subtlety out the window, director Gregory Doran goes all out for farce in a great fun start to the 2025 Chichester Festival Theatre summer season, huge on slapstick and with maximum silliness. Never less than over the top, Doran’s production is played at great pace, a rush from first to last which maybe takes a little getting used to but then sweeps you along on its tide of heightened humour.

In Gogol’s 19th century Ukraine, Friday Night Dinner star Tom Rosenthal is mistaken for a high-ranking government inspector from St Petersburg by a bunch of utterly corrupt townsfolk. Towards the end of the first half, Rosenthal is brilliant as his Khlestakov, scarcely believing his luck, puts past penury behind him and drunkenly goes on a massive flight of fantasy amid townspeople nervously hanging on his every word. Even better is the start of the second half when the various local dignitaries queue up to ply him with cash for fear of being exposed for all their failings.

Rosenthal is excellent in giving us a Khlestakov disbelievingly waking up to good fortune where he least expected it, and he is great too as he ponders a between-the-sheets match with either the Mayor’s wife or the Mayor’s daughter, respectively Sylvestra Le Touzel as Anna and Laurie Ogden as Marya, the two combining hilariously as unlikely love rivals, Le Touzel wonderfully channelling her inner Mrs Slocombe.

Great fun too from the night’s other great double act, Miltos Yerolemou as Bobchkinsky, Paul Rider as Dobchinsky, characters who might have tumbled straight out of the pages of a Dickens. Lloyd Hutchinson has a great time – and so do we, thanks to him – as the most appallingly (and likeably!) corrupt of mayors. And equally impressive is Nick Haverson as Osip, Khlestakov’s servant, the only one other than Khlestakov who knows precisely what is going on – and consequently fears monumental trouble ahead.

It all takes place on a fabulous set with beautiful costumes, Doran wisely choosing to pitch it at the time it was written rather than updating it to now. Now, that really would have been unsubtle. Far better to allow us to draw our own parallels with what might or might not be happening right now in our own corridors of power.

Just occasionally you might wish for the silliness to be toned down just a touch, particularly with the heavy-footed policeman running endlessly to and fro but at least this is silliness which is consistently silly and played full heartedly. Doran certainly hasn’t chosen to eke out the sophistication in the satire, but there is no doubting that he has delivered a riotous evening – and an appealing start to this summer at the CFT. Ultimately The Government Inspector is great fun and in the end that’s precisely what we need right now, everyone ramping up the laughs in Phil Porter’s excellent new adaptation.

Beautiful Ukrainian folk music provides the scene-shifting interludes, and the frozen ending, which seems to have divided preview audiences, really does work really well – the only time we can remotely pause for thought!