Satirical Slavs

By T.E.K.

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR by NIKOLAI GOGOL

A fully developed bureaucracy is the most ludicrous form of tyranny. Petty, self-important and stupid men, who in themselves amount to nothing, become bloated with their functions and turn authority into farce. This is the central aspect of Gogol's 140-year-old surrealistic satire The Government Inspector.

The play proves to be a very happy choice for the launching of an ambitious new regional theater, the Hartman Theater Company in Stamford, Conn. The troupe is housed in a handsome reconverted movie house, which may be a portent of an increasingly widespread interest in the legitimate theater. Initially, the Hartman plans to put on a seven-play season, and the offerings this year will include The Threepenny Opera, Joan of Lorraine by Maxwell Anderson, and the world premiere of a play called The Runner Stumbles by Milan Stitt.

The plot of The Government Inspector is deceptively simple. The mayor of a small Russian town--his name, Anton Antonovich Skuoznik Dmukhanovsky, is almost larger than his constituency--has received a letter indicating that the equivalent of an IRS investigator has been dispatched from the capital to examine the town's fiscal books. Since the mayor (George S. Irving) and his cronies are as crooked as counterfeit rubles, they are understandably distressed.

Local Suckers. Two of the mayor's more idiotic henchmen report they have discovered the government inspector, Ivan Alexandrovich Khlyestakov (Austin Pendleton), living incognito in a local hotel. This chap is actually an impecunious government clerk from St. Petersburg, but once he appears, sycophancy reigns supreme. Khlyestakov is a fop with the instincts of P.T. Barnum. He rooks the local suckers of all their ready cash, comes close to seducing the mayor's wife (Sloane Shelton) and daughter (Erin Ozker) and then blows town. Like the tolling of the bell of doom, a resplendent attache arrives from Moscow to announce the coming of the real inspector general.

Pendleton is a slyly winning con man, Irving a pompously discombobulated pol, and the rest of the cast is thoroughly dependable in this wackily comic repast fit for a czar.

T. E. K.

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