The Government Inspector

A charming and funny new take on a classic play

★★★★☆ Jan 31 ’23

Taking inspiration from Nikolai Gogol’s 19th Century satirical comedy, this modern adaptation opens the famous black door of number 10 Downing Street for a tale of greed, a tale of power and a whole lot of musical madness.

I went to see this show as part of MTFestUK 2023 please read my MTFest Explained post to learn more about how that worked. I saw this show at the Turbine Theatre which is a very teeny tiny venue – there are about 100 seats. Although this isn’t a big West End venue it’s a really cosy, intimate theatre, I loved the deco and there were playbills, programmes and scripts in the corridor.

The basic premise of the show was that the government heard that the new King was getting an undercover inspector inside the doors of Downing Street and the Prime minister mistakenly found the wrong person in a Weatherspoons pub, a broke American trying to launch their web company. He gets taken to number 10, unfortunately they only showed act 1 and I found myself wanting to know what happened next. I felt that sometimes the pacing of the show felt a little slow and we got lots of explanation and set up for act 2 but we didn’t see act 2. Obviously there would be an act 2 in a full version of this show but if you spend most of act 1 explaining and setting up you only have a short amount of time to get the main plot across.

One of the stand out performances was the Prime ministers daughter played by Liv Koplick, she was an aspiring singer with her father paying all her expenses. It was a really funny plot and her song was well executed, there were many laughs throughout the show and I was thoroughly entertained.

Whilst I think this show may need some rewrites and reworks I think it is very promising material and can’t wait to see where it goes next – I will definitely be booking a ticket.