Word: khlestakov
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Into this festering, still pool of corruption drops the inert stone of Khlestakov, the young visitor, sending violent waves through everyone else's life but remaining happily, passively at rest himself. Mark Linn-Baker seems deliberately to make no more and no less of this character than Gogol did--which is to say, nothing, a personality-less cipher whose every action either fulfills the most hollow expectations of societal conduct or moves inertially towards a well-fed rest. Unable to choose, he mechanically makes love to both the mayor's wife and daughter--two primped peacocks immobile on a divan...
...exhibitionist audacity of his King Lear last winter. The town officials enter the stage almost exclusively via trapdoors, and leave the same way, jumping and holding their noses as if plunging into a Gehennan sewer. In a lengthy scene of bribetaking, they materialize one at a time before Khlestakov from pits in the candle-lit stage like, apparitions from his own unconscious...
...Most of the Russian adages come across powerfully--as when the distraught mayor cries, "I have outlived my own mind!"--but occasionally lines fail to connect ("Both have fallen finger-first in heaven"). Gogol's sense of the absurd surfaces frequently and effectively in this translation, too--as in Khlestakov's repeated avowal that various important officials are "on a friendly foot with me." But the constant jumbling and inversion of sentence order sometimes gives the impression that the translation is simply clumsy. Intentionally or not, many characters sound like foreign tourists struggling with an English phrase-book...
Only once does the comic energy flag and seriousness take over: a series of afflicted towns-people visits Khlestakov, and on a dimly lit stage two women plead for his assistance in tedious, unexpectedly serious tones. It seems like a screwed-up bit of pacing. But then a macabre, unforgettable vision appears: a group of eerie, frazzled black scarecrows in a Brownian movement behind the transparent plastic sheet that forms the stage's rear boundary, staring at Khlestakov like a second, ghostly audience. In his impenetrable complacency, he can ignore them with a wave of his hand...
...these officials live by deceit, they are slaves of self-deception. Trying to identify the incognito inspector, they settle on a newcomer at the local hotel who has overdrawn his credit and is foppish, imperious and curious. Actually, Ivan Alexandrovich Khlestakov (Max Wright) is a petty clerk who has gone broke gambling. When the mayor approaches him, Khlestakov assumes that he is about to be thrown into jail. As the mutual misconceptions multiply, the fun flies like...