Gogol farce on Russian corruption inspired Revisor
Early this year, playwright and actor Jonathon Young had no idea that the remounting of Kidd Pivot’s Revisor would occur in the midst of a bloody invasion of Ukraine. He wrote the dancetheatre hybrid production, which premiered to glowing reviews at the Vancouver Playhouse in 2019. It’s based on Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 farce The Inspector General (also known as The Government Inspector), about a man mistaken for a government inspector in a small provincial town, where everyone bends over to please him.
Gogol was born in Ukraine and moved to St. Petersburg, which happens to be the birthplace of Russian president Vladimir
Putin. It was in this city where Gogol found fame as a playwright, novelist, and author of short stories.
“I have been thinking more about Nikolai Gogol and his journey as a writer,” Young tells the Straight by phone from his home in Toronto. “He was, essentially, an outsider to St. Petersburg, which afforded him a perspective that insiders didn’t have. Also, there was a real appetite when he arrived in Russia for the folk tales of what they called ‘Little Russia’—Ukrainian folk tales.”
Young points out that Gogol filtered these stories of his homeland through “his own particular and peculiar lens”. “And they became something that no one
had ever read or seen, and ended up really shaping Russian literature,” he says.
According to Young, Gogol assumed that The Inspector General would serve as a moral indictment of bureaucracy and officialdom in the way it portrayed the corruption of the state. But that didn’t happen at all.
“It was instantly absorbed as a grotesque comedy—an over-the-top farce—so that even the tsar was able to sanction it and love it and laugh at it,” Young says. “It became a national institution almost instantly and survived through the chaos and upheaval of Russia.”
In Soviet times, it was something that artists could radicalize. Director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1926 nonrealist production of Revizor [the Russian name], for example, brought a new theatrical inventiveness to the play, Young says. It was later covered in an issue of Yale University’s Theater magazine.
Young had an old tattered copy of the publication, complete with Meyerhold’s production notes, on his shelf at home. So when he and Kidd Pivot founder and choreographer Crystal Pite discussed creating a farce, they decided that Gogol’s play would be ideal for this purpose.
In Young and Pite’s version, actors recorded the script, which is heard in the theatre through the audio system. Dancers lip-sync these words on-stage while moving in often strange and bewildering ways.
“It is quite a radical adaptation even though the inherent structure is the same,” he adds. “Very little remains of Gogol’s text—almost nothing.”
He reveals that one of the characters knows what’s going on behind the scenes. And he can barely contain himself.
“He has these outbursts where he cannot stop talking,” Young says. “His body is almost puppeteered by the language inside him. The pressure is so great for it to come out.” Another character, the interrogator, is quite the opposite. She’s suffering from a condition that prevents her from speaking.
“She can barely get a word out at times,” the playwright says. “And they’re contending with a ‘movement’, which is never described beyond that.”
Last year, Stanford University Slavic literature expert Yuliya Ilchuk’s book Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity argued that the writer’s cultural identity was a product of “negotiation with imperial and national cultural codes and values”.
“By examining Gogol’s ambivalent selffashioning, language performance, and textual practices,” the publisher’s blurb says, “this book shows how Gogol played with both imperial and local sources of identity and turned his hybridity into a project of subtle cultural resistance.”
Moreover, Ilchuk argued that Russia’s imperial culture depended on Ukrainian intellectuals like Gogol in its development. Young is very aware of that influence.
“He’s known as sort of the father of Russian modernism and even, in a weird sense, psychological realism that began to flourish at the end of the 19th century,” Young says. “And many of those writers trace their inspiration back to Gogol.”
Young finds it shocking that in the space of a couple of years since Revisor was last performed, it will now resonate in “a different and more present way”.
“In early 2020, before the pandemic, we gathered for the first remount and the beginnings of a tour that would have taken us to St. Petersburg and Moscow,” he says. “That was where the tour was to end. It was, of course, cancelled by April and so we never made it there—and I doubt we ever will now.”
DanceHouse presents Kidd Pivot’s at the Vancouver Playhouse from March 30 to April 2.