Imagine finding a rat scrabbling around a tin of Quality Street. All the corruption and chaos set against a such a gaudy backdrop.
That is how visionary director Richard Jones sees the Russian town in Nikolai Gogol's Government Inspector. Not as a grey, provincial sinkhole of petty jealousies (although it is that as well) but as an Alice in Wonderland tumbling circus of increasing madness.
The potential in the story's central conceit is gloriously realised and the result is a full night of comic nourishment with dazzling performances set against a dancing backdrop.
The story centres on a forgotten town that makes not a spittle blip on St Petersburg's radar - until a government inspector is sent to check on the mayor's regime.
Eager to locate the inspector, who is travelling incognito, the bumbling bureaucrats chance upon a visiting low-ranking Walter Mitty official. His folie de grandeur chimes wonderfully with the townsfolk's view of a cosmopolitan city slicker.
So follows a rising auction of flatterers and flattered exposing the hypocrisy and vacuity of both parties - but not before revolution is fomented, love is won and lost and the townsfolk turn politics to pantomime.
Julian Barratt, as the Mayor, visibly pales during the performance. He appears uncomfortable in his skin and, while betraying lack of theatrical experience, he offers a thoroughly enjoyable performance full of knowing nods and winks.
He channels a greasy David Brent while maintaining a menace that hints at a vast well of cruelty beneath the sweaty exterior.
As his frustrated wife Anna, Doon Mackichan has the low cunning of a wannabe Wag, the desperation of a Mrs Bennett and the dress sense of Hamley's Christmas window.
But this is Kyle Soller's show. As Khlestakov, the semi-delusional debtor, he finds himself in an hallucination with a parade of officials stuffing roubles in his pocket while pale provincial women offer him their hearts and truffles.
His manic escalation as he rises physically from sofa to mantlepiece and mild-mannered exaggeration to rampant flights of self-aggrandisement is a masterly display of choreography, timing and tension. Like a Swan Vesta, he has a bobble of red atop a rake thin frame and he juts and poses like a Dickensian caricature.
Among the flawless support Amanda Lawrence's Postmaster receives most laughs while Jack Brough and Fergus Craig as Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky perform an unnerving Tweedledum and Tweedledee double act.
Invention comes throughout the evening, from the audience's arrival through the front door of a Russian house to the rats running the picture rail, and while Jones underplays the indictments of corruption that was Gogol's purpose, he skewers the comic scenes with an unerring sharpness.
As farce becomes nightmare, Government Inspector becomes a 19th century version of The Hangover.
– From June 2011
