THE THEATRE
(" The Government Inspector " by Nicholas Gogol, Barnes Theatre.) WE go to Barnes, in these days, in order to find ourselves in Moscow. But there is not an indefinite supply of Russian plays in• the new manner ; and so, this time, Mr. Philip Ridgeway has had to fall back upon the old—upon Gogol's simple comedy of " Mistaken Identity : " the story of the spendthrift young traveller who arrives, penniless, in a little provincial town, and is received by the Governor, and all the other functionaries, as the official whom the central authorities are known to be sending to enquire into local administration.
A well-worn situation, which can be, and has recently been, set forth scenically in the solid bourgeois manner of " straight " presentation. These humdrum methods, how- ever, are not M. Komisarjevsky's. He has spring-cleaned the old stuff by dabbing it all over with streaks of bright colour. He has lifted it out of the region of the real and the rather obvious into that of futurist fancy. He has made doll-like soldiers of a wooden aspect guard a round-about platform on which fantastic figures totter as a change of scene is indicated. He allows our old pantomine friend, the stuffed nag, to take the place of the real horse or donkey that carries the young spendthrift away from the time of his life in the provinces ; and, in sum, he has transfigured the old Russia until its aspect resembles that of a mock fair painted in miniature for the Chauve Souris.
The general effect is that we seem to be watching a pro- duction rather than a play. And the argument of the sterner critic may well be : " If a work isn't worth giving us in the spirit of its author, is it worth giving at all ? If it cannot stand upon its own legs, why try to make it dance on other peoples ? "
To which the answer (already suggested) is that Barnes must be up-to-date ; that modern producers are no longer pedants, as they were in the day of accurate nineteenth- century actor-managers (from Charles Kean to Henry Irving) who aimed at correctness of local or historical derail ; and, besides, that there is enough satirical intention in Gogol to justify the further mockery of his types by making them hop and jump as puppets instead of walking as men and women upon solid earth.
Have we not seen Shakespeare gaily and oddly attired, in the fairy tale style, as in the Savoy production of Twelfth Night years ago ? Once it is accepted, you have only to ask whether this style is consistently used and whether the acting harmonises with the decoration. Now one or two performances in this revival of The Government Inspector contrast, by a certain solidity of careful realism, with the airs and graces of others ; so that the quiet comedy (old style) of Mr. Alfred Clark's Town Governor hardly matches the dazzling Ivan Alexandrovitch of Mr. Claude Rains. Some of the characters, in fact, walk, while others skip. The two little men, local gossips, Dobchinski and Bobchinski caper all through ; while the admirably studied peasant, Osip, of Mr. Charles Loughton, is a bit of real Russia, as we suppose it may be at the moment. The discrepancy is perhaps not very serious, but the performances of the realists give the audience an excuse for believing that just as much fun could have been got out of The Government Inspector had it been played soberly, instead of being made so deliriously unreal.
R.J.
Previous page
