On Stage
VALENTINE, DEAN
On Stage CUTTING GOGOL BY DEAN VALENTINE N Jk. ~ ikolai Gogol's The Inspector General is a very straightforward play; even, in the case of the plot, a simple one. The idea apparently was...
...From there, the road to The Inspector General is not a long one...
...more exactly...
...It consists of nothing save a wooden table and a few chairs center stage, two staircases joined by a balcony, and a wooden floor, painted red—the kind of empty, chi-chi setting popular with the avant-garde...
...As to the former, among the main points of contention between the combatants is the legitimacy of paying $80,000 for a star footballer...
...Who exactly unseats whom, 1 can't remember...
...To thus rob the play of time and place is to considerably blunt the strand whose thrust is realistic satire...
...The best that can be said for this comedy is that it is quaint...
...What is altogether out of place are the pockets of languor that trip the rhythm as surely as Bobchinsky trips through Khlesta-kov's door...
...I mean they're all so concerned with their own interests that they natter, natter, natter, natter, natter and they never stop...
...In Gogol, just after the Postmaster has revealed Khlestakov as a fraud, recriminations fill the air...
...Everyone on stage freezes in terror—for they will be judged—and this tableaux, Gogol tells us, must be held for "almost a minute and a half to produce the proper effect...
...Petersburg, they have been informed by letter, is traveling incognito through the province, and will certainly stop by...
...chairs are banged on the floor and moved from place to place for no good reason...
...Ciulei, for reasons I cannot fathom, does not bother with it at all...
...So much for Ciulei...
...When the text specifically calls for silence, Ciulei cannot bring himself to allow it...
...Pitted against them in what looks like a hopeless cause are the coach (Rex Robbins)and the players...
...The idea apparently was suggested to Gogol by his friend Pushkin, who related how during a stay at an inn in Ninji-Novgorod he was mistaken for an important official and, as a consequence, treated with extreme deference...
...Mistaken-identity stories were hardly new or uncommon when Gogol heard of Pushkin's experience, so it is strange that the play it inspired has from the beginning provoked widely disparate reactions...
...But the execution is execrable...
...It involves an extremely talented footballer who refuses to give his all for the team, smokes dope and generally comports himself in a manner unbefitting an Australian football star...
...The shouting and agonizing continue briefly until, at the very end, a gendarme appears to proclaim the arrival of the real Inspector General...
...Ever since the premiere in 1836, in fact, critics have divided into two camps...
...For example, as each corrupt official comes on stage—the Judge, the Director of Charities, the Postmaster?he takes a seat, only to be unseated by the following personage, to whose higher rank he must defer...
...Ciulei has produced only noise a violent torrent of it that floods the plav and, by the second act, drowns it...
...Like a corpse at a wake, these dead spots are present amid the bustle, an unpleasant effect attributable to poor blocking and even poorer delivery of lines...
...In their frantic dread, the scoundrels mistake a stupid, dissolute, penniless civil servant—Khles-takov—for the emissary of the government...
...At least the hullabaloo is not entirely inapt (merely inept...
...In the other camp are those who see in the piece strains of the grotesque, the absurd, the surrealistic, and the fantastic...
...1 he actors shout at the top of their lungs...
...the worst that it is stupid...
...By American standards, that's peanuts...
...Worse still, at the announcement, the Mayor, his wife and the officials utter a cry, not of surprise or terror, but of what sounds like joy—which is criminal, as well as senseless...
...The first, and by no means least significant problem is the set, designed by Karen Schulz...
...Being a man with .22 moral caliber, Khlestakov not only accepts their "gifts," he assumes the role thrust on him with charming gusto, embellishing it with the most fantastic lies to appease the excited imaginations of his audience...
...even the meanest hack on the sports page summoned his most elegant variations to decry money's invasion of team-spirit...
...It is also what makes it one of the greatest...
...They wine him, dine him, petition him, thrust wads of ruble notes into his pockets...
...At the urging of his servant Osip, Khlestakov scrams just UP in time, having promised to return shortly to marry the Mayor's daughter...
...With his W. C. Fields manner of speaking and his furiously shifty eyes, Wright evinces disingen-uousness—and in the process manages to topple the main point of The Inspector General: Khlestakov is merely the passive instrument by which the corrupt trick themselves...
...D avid Wiliamson's Players tackles the thorny problems of Australian football...
...At the end, in a grand dramatic moment, we learn that the reason for his shoddy behavior lies in his fear that he is no longer man enough for his opponents...
...a servant has been shorn of her lines (not to worry: they have been put into the mouth of a new servant of Ciulei's creation) and asked to scamper across the stage emitting the harsh cries of a demented whippoorwill—all this simply to create the "alienating" verbal texture beloved of directors like Ciulei...
...In his production of this masterpiece at Circle in the Square, Liviu Ciulei, the much-heralded Roumanian director, tries to provide both the satirical and absurdist elements...
...In one, there are those who view the play as a satire—a realistic indictment of Tsarist officialdom in all its provincialism, corruption and duplicity...
...Until about two years ago, the subject was discussed endlessly...
...Vladimir Nabokov, the most eloquent member of this group, wrote: "Gogol's play is poetry in action and by poetry I mean the mysteries of the irrational as perceived through rational words...
...theirs is an association of scoundrels, democratic to the core...
...For about two hours we observe the machinations of two factions warring about the best way out of the rut...
...Another unpalatable feature is Ciu-lei's evident desire to improve on Gogol...
...The sense that we are in early 19th-century rural Russia, in an isolated small town ?a three years ride to the nearest border"—has been sliced away...
...They are mostly ruthless, scheming men who view the players as commodities...
...Max Wright's Khlestakov was less offensive, though equally ineffective...
...The Inspector General is both a put-down of Russian reality and a flight into realms that can be reached through poetry alone...
...This is what makes it one of the strangest plays ever written...
...it is not important anyway, for this jockeying is entirely gratuitous, crass vaudeville...
...The truth, as is often and depressingly the case, lies in the middle...
...Theodore Bikel in the role of the Mayor struts and frets his hours on the stage neighing in a thick accent—a Russian Mister Ed...
...Moreover, all this bemoaning athletes' high salaries and rapacious front office men has a musty odor...
...Under the heading of stupid comes Williamson's subplot...
...The action takes place in the boardroom of what was once the continent's premier team, now fallen on hard times...
...Simpson probably makes as much for every suitcase he hurdles...
...Must we really hear it all again—in the form of a play about Australian football no less...
...As for the acting, with the exception of Bob Bal-aban's shy and wise Osip, it is a disgrace...
...Soon thereafter, a letter is read proving him a fraud, and presently the arrival of the real Inspector General is announced...
...On one side are the team's administrator (Gene Rupert), president (Thomas A. Carlin), and vice president (Fred Gwynne...
...The effort is commendable...
...Peter Brook has noted that The Inspector General "starts —woof, crash, and it goes like that right through, one feels, because they all talk too much, they ne\er stop talking...
...Various members of its administration—all of them corrupt—are gathered in the home of the Mayor to prepare for the Day of Reckoning: An official from St...
...Yet such faults, dispiriting as they may be, are trivial compared to the director's failure to live up to his larger responsibilities...
...They care about the virtues of the game —doing your damndest for the team, and that sort of thing...
...Gogol makes no distinction in rank among characters...
...That kind of adolescent silliness we can do without, thank you...
...If they'd shut up for a minute they might see who Khlestakov is . .. but they can't...
...The scene is a small town in Russia...
Vol. 61 • October 1978 • No. 20
