IT’S ONE of the funniest, most accusatory, plays ever written. Gogol’s 1836 masterpiece
The Government Inspector crops up regularly and with the strangest of performers in the lead part of Khlestakov, a penniless nobody whom the mayor and sundry bent officials of a squalid Russian town assume is an important government inspector travelling incognito.
Cue a sustained farce of sycophantic grovelling and bribery, which the worthless Khlestakov laps up and exploits over five acts. The play’s plot inspired the Fawlty Towers episode The Hotel Inspector. It is also the basis of the new comedy The UN Inspector currently at the National Theatre.
Twenty years ago the comedian Rik Mayall played Khlestakov in a version by the poet Adrian Mitchell at the National. Now it’s the turn of the television impressionist Alistair McGowan to star in a Chichester Festival Theatre production, in a new adaptation by the satirist Alistair Beaton. McGowan’s Big Impression on the BBC — with his brilliant co-star Ronni Ancona — has made him a household face or, rather, faces. But the man who graduated from drama school and worked his way to stardom after years of toiling in radio comedy is at heart a thwarted thespian.
The director Martin Duncan, who had worked with McGowan on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame at Nottingham Playhouse, insisted that he take the job at Chichester. There is, after all, a strange showbiz pedigree attached to the role of the fantasising flaneur: Khlestakov has been played by the likes of Tony Hancock and Danny Kaye.
McGowan never saw Mayall in the part and is now glad he didn’t: “I can imagine him doing it so well. Part of the problem I am having at the moment is that I can easily imagine several other people doing it. An impression might pop out — that’s my biggest fear. Khlestakov is described by Gogol as ‘an empty vessel’. But the nearest parallel for me is Billy Liar — he has this similar ability to fantasise about things and embellish.”
A relentless routine of television work — the elaborate make-up impersonators use these days is in itself an ordeal — has driven McGowan to regard this summer theatre job as something of a refuge. As part of the Chichester ensemble he will also be playing King James in a Gunpowder Plot drama, 5/11, later in the season.
“I was getting to the stage where I just thought I needed to do something else. To act in something where you have to be 40 characters over a period of six weeks is hard. The research is hard too. My girlfriend used to tear her hair out because as soon as I came home I’d be looking at tapes for the next day. I’d spend the whole weekend watching Rising Damp or Watchdog.”
I wondered if McGowan, Rory Bremner et al sit at home at the weekends suffering from multiple personality disorder, wondering just who they are? Perhaps that is what sent Mike Yarwood off the rails. “It’s something I felt at the end of each series,” McGowan says. “Ronni and I had forgotten who we were. But I don’t feel like an empty vessel. I like to be organised and plot my days. Khlestakov doesn’t. He’s also a hedonist, something which I am trying hard to become!”
McGowan has a Midlands background; his parents were both teachers. You might assume that impressionists are a psychologically even weirder bunch of people than magicians. But his take on his chosen trade is that “impressionists are just greedy actors. You want to be all these characters at the same time.”
His boyhood inspiration came from fairly obvious sources. “Mike Yarwood used to amuse me hugely. But by his own admission he did caricatures and he was more interested in the physical side of things, changing his face and his look. Also, there was more a sense of entertainment and vaudeville about in those days. We were very lucky that we came after The Royle Family. That show changed the way you were able to act on TV. It was a real turning point. It enabled us just to be people and not play up to an audience.”
He admits that he always wanted to act: “That is why Ronni and I get a bit annoyed when people say, ‘Oh, you’re going to do some acting now, are you?’ I say, ‘Well, what do you think we’ve been doing in the impressionist show?’ We felt that we had been those characters. The best impressions I do are the ones when I feel like them. Lineker, Sven (G öran Eriksson) and Beckham are good performances, though I don’t think they are my best voices.”
His best voices? “My Louis Theroux is good . . . very much a John Major back of the throat voice, sycophantic, slightly removed and suspicious,” he says perfectly in character. “My worst was Ozzy Osbourne . . . I never got inside his head.
“There’s a lot of wish fulfilment in it — you’ve got to want to be those people. That’s true for all impressionists. What would it be like to have been a footballer or a sports presenter? In the work place, factory floor or playground, if you can do an impression of somebody there’s a dark magic about it — a sort of necromancy.”
Sometimes, he says, he’s not aware of a trait that he’s observed and then copied. In the run-up to the Gogol opening he is consciously suppressing characters that he’s absorbed by years of osmosis: “Leonard Rossiter is one of them. There’s a scene in which Khlestakov is starving and he’s soft-soaping the waiter. I have to resist the temptation to say [his Reggie Perrin voice is uncanny] ‘How are you today? Good, good, lots of guests this evening? Good, good.’ Hugh Laurie — as Wooster — is in there at times; also a bit of Eddie Izzard and a hint of Dylan Moran. I keep thinking: ‘Stop worrying about them, you just do it yourself, McGowan’.”
- The Government Inspector is in preview and opens on Thursday at the Chichester Festival Theatre (01243 781312)
WHEN COMICS GO CLASSICAL
Frankie Howerd As Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Old Vic (1957)
Tony Hancock Took the title role in the BBC’s adaptation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector (1958)
Jimmy Jewel Scored critical successes in Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians (1975), and Death of a Salesman (1977)
Norman Wisdom Moving as a cancer patient in the BBC drama Going Gently (1981)
John Cleese As Petruchio for the BBC’s The Taming of the Shrew (1980)
Steve Martin Appeared with Robin Williams in Waiting for Godot in New York (1988)
Les Dawson Played a 101-year-old woman in the TV adaptation of Roberto Cossa’s play Nona (1991)
Eddie Izzard Played Lenny Bruce in Lenny for Peter Hall (1999)
Frank Skinner Among several comedians to appear in Yasmina Reza’s Art
Dawn French Showed us her Bottom in a West End staging of The Dream (2001)
