Word: inspector
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PLAYS LIKE THE INSPECTOR GENERAL have made mistaken identity and its ramifications a classic comic theme. The dichotomy between appearances and realities usually opens all sorts of possibilities for subtle and not-so-subtle irony, and Nikolai Gogol's mid-nineteenth century comedy is no exception...
...hungry young Petersburg dandy. Ivan Alexandrovitch Khlestakov, is holed up in a small-town hotel room, living on credit, and starving, unable to pay his bills, having lost all his money at cards. Meanwhile, the town's mayor receives words that an inspector general, travelling incognito, is to pay a surprise visit to the town, where he will inevitably discover all of the pecadillos and greater sins the administrators have made habitual. The officials mistake the impoverish Khlestakov for the Inspector General, and he is wined, dined, and "lost" money (the officials leading it think that they are bribing...
Provided gullibility to the flash of the city is another traditional literary motif, and Gegal exploits it to the hill. The townspeople strain to believe that the vain, petulant, but eminently purchaseable (and therefore not so terrifying after all) dandy is a real inspector general. At the same time Khlestakov screams with fear that these locals are going to incarcerate him in their jail. But Khlestakov and his manservant Osip, are the ones who group the situation and take advantage of the confusion. Eventually, all of the feuding factions are victimized by the liar from the city...
John Rudman is eminently credible in his title role as an inspector general-Petersburg dandy. He has a less and hungry look appropriate to an official in the Russian bureaucracy, but his hunger is for entertainment (or, at one point, food), rather than power, and his foppish manner belies initial impressions. Nourished by the town's mistaken flattery, Khlestakov's age expends as his imperious manner is fed as he deludes himself by the lies he concocts to increase his importance in the eyes of the locals...
...Inspector General is extraordinarily dependent on a mob of minor characters to sharpen it. Throughout the play, dozens of lesser figures, each with a foible, prods the play forward or merely establishes a stereotype. The title figure does not even appear until the second act, the first is spent as the town's officials establish that they are all bastards and vulnerable to even the most superficial housecleaning. The first act doesn't work too well, but it does establish the necessary preliminaries. The act is redeemed from tedium by the performances of two local landowners, Peter Ivanovich Dobchinski...