Five Inspectors General simultaneously on Ukrainian stage

The festival under the eloquent motto “Gentlemen, the Inspector General is Coming” became something like a test of inventiveness for Kyiv and Ukrainian theaters, something like a creative stretch. Well, gentlemen, take Nikolai Gogol. How many totally different but without doubt masterful Inspectors General are you prepared to present?

The theaters picked up the gauntlet and showed five comedies about bureaucratic horrors in a provincial town. The manner of performance and the cast’s and director’s temperaments allowed one to pass judgment on different regions of Ukraine. In Gogol’s four days sojourned a cozy chamber production a la Volyn from the Lutsk oblast theater, a sparing portrayal of Chernihiv Youth Theater with Khlestakov excellently played by Roman Pokrovsky, Kyiv Youth Theater’s avant-garde rendition by Kulish, called REkhuVIliZOR, the capital’s Russian Drama’s classical, strictly by-the-book production, and a carefully verified but somewhat drawn-out tragicomedy of the Artem Ukrainian Musical Drama Theater from Donetsk.

However, the point of the matter is not the quality and distinctions of these productions. The very idea, undertaken at a very long temporal distance from Gogol’s jubilee, would have looked rather untimely, had it not been for one “but.” I do not know about others but the line about the Inspector General’s imminent arrival immediately reminded me about other numerous and at times impotent inspectors visiting by foot or by car all those powerful gentlemen. It reminded me of coal miners and teachers in Donetsk and Chernihiv marching on Kyiv to demand their miserable back pay; of emissaries from international organizations trying for the umpteenth time to inspect our variation of democracy in order to understand who we really are and where we are actually going; of all kinds of observers, officials, and ordinary tourists seeing the back side of our lifestyle. However, the thing is not only our social problems. Gogol’s genius, among other things, is that one can see something other than frightened provincial bureaucrats, something much more important. Gogol’s provincial town is also a kind of frozen Noah’s Ark, a model of mankind as a whole. If so, the fear of his personae is also more serious; it is the horror of man, any man anticipating the Last Judgment. This Judgment will be passed by a Judge far more formidable, one that remains outside the play for the time being, indicated only by a short closing line. Here perhaps lies the precise timing of the story and the participating drama companies managed to keep this timing right at the end of the most theatrical of all centuries.