Robert Tanitch reviews Revisor at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London EC1
REVISOR is presented by Kidd Pivot, a Canadian contemporary dance theatre company based in Vancouver and led by its founder and artistic director, Crystal Pite.
Director and choreographer Pite and her co-creator, writer and actor Jonathon Young, are fascinated by how language and the body are connected and thought it would be fun to stage a farce as a dance theatre.
Revisor, which premiered in 2019 and is performed in 90 minutes without interval, is based on Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector, a classic comedy of mistaken identity and an unforgettable satire on the bribery and corruption which went on in Tsarist Russia’s civil service.
The Tsar, at its very first performance in 1836, was the first to admit to the play’s truth and overruled the censor, who wanted to ban it. “Everyone has received his due,” he said, “and I most of all.”
Klestakov, a mere clerk on the lowest order in the civil service, travelling in a remote provincial backwater, penniless and starving, suddenly finds himself lionized and feted.
The whole town (“a cess pit of corruption”) is so over awed by what they take to be Klestakov’s culture and breeding that it never crosses their minds that he is not the government inspector and they fall over themselves to give him money.
Pite and Young call their much-edited adaptation Revisor, which is also a pun on Revizor, the Russian word for Inspector.
A voice-over text is used for score. 7 actors have prerecorded bits of Gogol’s text. 8 dancers have had to synchronize the words with their movement so that it seems as if they are actually talking.
The agile and talented cast dissemble and posture to striking paroxysmal effects. The characters are outrageously caricatured (Gogol would not have approved!).
The dancers writhe, spiral, reshape and misshape their bodies in cartoonish ways. Legs are splayed and torsos twitch. The loose-limbed contorted movements are extraordinary and often hilarious.
Half-way through Gogol’s plot is interspersed with abstract sections which (I quote) ‘delve into the darker world underlying the satire’. Here, the pre-recorded voice is the voice of the choreographer directing the dancers and occasionally asking, “Who am I? Why am I here? What does it mean?”
What is fascinating is that the choreography we have just seen is now repeated without the Gogol costumes and farcical grimaces and it is seen in a completely different and contemporary and serious light.
Revisor returns to farce for the final Gogol sequence. The dancers received a standing ovation which went on for a long time.
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