This slick but shallow adaptation of Gogol’s classic 1836 satire takes a comedy grounded in the very real corruption of Tsarist Russia and gives it a very English lobotomy.
It’s not that the performances in director Patrick Myles’s adaptation aren’t individually enjoyable. Kiell Smith-Bynoe is highly watchable as Percy Fopdoodle, a skint, posh, amoral petty bureaucrat who drifts into a small town on the way back to his family home after being fired, and is immediately fawned over by the town council, who have erroneous convinced themselves he is the titular high ranking official. Martha Howe-Dougles – Smith-Bynoe’s co-star from beloved TV comedy ‘Ghosts’ – is delightfully OTT as the local mayor‘s wife Anna Swashprattle, so provincial she pronounces the word ‘counts’ as ‘cunts’.
But it all adds up to very little: Myles’s production doesn’t feel like it’s satirising anything about the England in which it’s set (or ours for that matter). It’s just a clunkingly simple farce about a group of sitcom-style idiots who spend two hours flapping their way through the motions. Undemanding fun in its way, but Gogol’s ‘Government Inspector’ is a brilliant satire on corruption and this… is not.