Theatre

Inspector General is a satirical comedy that captures the hilarious indictment of political corruption in the Russian administration. It was published in 1836 and it tells a simple story of a young civil servant, Khlestakov, who apparently finds himself stranded in a small provincial town. Mistakenly, Khlestakov is taken by the local officials and made the government inspector. He happily adopts his role and exploits the situation where his true identity is revealed but then a real inspector arrives. Inspector General is the sort of nineteenth century slapstick which entertains and delights with its universally shallow character. Considering that these characters are nearly all government officials, they are the very people who supposedly should selflessly serve and protect the people but Gogol reveals them as self serving idiots whose concerns are only about protecting themselves. Gogol masterfully creates peoples, places and things with few words and allows them to disappear in the flow of the story.

The wide social spectrum of the play, the recognizable Russianness of its characters and its richly colloquial language, forms some of the performances of the play Inspector General. However, the genius of the play lies in much more than its national style for many troupes of many nationalities have performed it. Gogols true brilliance lies in the form of the play. Accordingly, Gogol blends aspects of neoclassicism with other various dramatic genres as well as the comic blend of logic and illogicality.  Pavis asserts that the play and its form is best understood in the light of its power and speed. Gogol has thus streamlined with neoclassical devices and as a result, his characters are familiar to us and his plot turns on the classical case of a mistaken identity. For example, Mayra is a nave ingnue while Khlestakov is entirely a comic braggart.

The Inspector General closely follows the unity of action which gives it simplicity and elegance regardless of its social spectrum and colloquial language. Jennesse argues that because of Gogols personal creativity, he stuck on the form provided that it was useful to him. For instance, the unities of place and time are observed only loosely. The twenty four hours of the play are long drawn out over the course of two days and the action takes place in varied locations but all in one provincial home. The utile and dulce of Horace are evident in the play but Gogol blends utile into the dulce relying on the on the plays a few unique stylistic devices such as inverted catharsis rather than pure didactism as well as the comic absurdity of the play. Such inverted catharsis creates joy for the audience and purges them with laughter. The audience must exit through a gapping wound created by the exciting action with these emotions teeding of within them.

Accordingly, Gogol adopted the qualities of utile and dulce to give power and speed to his streamlined play. Arguably, previous playwrights relied on the use of raisonneur to express the utile in their plays. Basically, while this tended to make their plays moral lesson abundantly clear, it slowed down the comic pace thus creating a dead air for both audience and actors. Jennesse further asserts that Gogols radical and ingenuous solution was the complete elimination of raisoneur. As such, Inspector General revolves nearly out of control with self-serving amoral characters in farcical situations that beg physical comedy. For example, Khlestakovs simultaneous and dual seduction of mayors wife and daughter, his solicitation of bribes from several officials is the farcical situation that Gogols characters run in.

It is plausible to argue that Gogol intended to assume the post production release of his emotions to ideally stamp out corruption and improve society. It goes without saying that the original production of Inspector General was a vaudeville which arguably was detracting from Gogols vision of a socially corrective play. However, if we regard only Gogols intent to encourage his audience to seek beauty, perfection or redemption, such an artistic failure turns out to be an achievement. Although Inspector General left much to be desired aesthetically, but its ideological impact was great since it instigated the theatrical realism that Russian would be famed of some day.

As Mayerhold wrote about the play Inspector General, is that although it contains all the elements of a play, its production was constructed according to various established dramatic premise. Although Gogol employs a host of familiar services in the play, it is suddenly realized that the treatment of them is a new. Thus the nature of Gogols comedy was initially produced as a comedy of the absurd situation.

In this production, three prototypes take their legitimate place at the head of the performance. The first one is composite of the historical images from the original premiere while the second one consists of reminiscences from Meyerholds brilliant production staged at Meyerhold theatre in 1926. The third prototype obviously involves a reflection from contemporary cities that reveal to us both its sarcastic grimaces and sublimity. In this production, Pavis also contends that the birth of absurdity from the spirit of regular life is the trick which lies in the perception that impunity and vice can rule the world. It is in this sense that Gogols the Inspector General can be plausibly regarded as a state play.

Inspector General seems to closely follow the theatrical production approach of Stanislavsky. As such, the play builds on a directorially unified aesthetic and embodies a naturalistic staging as well as the independent theatre movement. Jennesse postulates that Stanislavsky organized his dramatic texts and theatrical production using realistic techniques that were made into a coherent and usable system. With regard to Inspector General, Gogol borrowed widely from Stanislavsky such that the performance of this play is a theater- made treated with serious endeavor that requires discipline dedication and integrity. The acting for example seems to have been subjected to rigorous artistic self analysis and reflection. According to Pavis, following the approach of Stanislavsky, the production of Inspector General as a dramatic piece, resulted from a persistent struggle to come over any hindrances. As a result, the development of performance was influenced by the development of a theorized praxis in which practice is widely used as the medium of inquiry fro the entire creative development.

The system of Stanislavsky acquired extraordinary ability to cross cultural boundaries. The many precepts of this system encompass aspects of the affective memory as well as the methods of physical actions. In light of the Inspector General, Gogol focused on the development of artistic truth to achieve performance techniques. As a result, emphasized on the onstage artistic truth such that actors lived the part they were performing during performance. Gogols Inspector General as a vaudeville focused on affective memory in a bid to create an ensemble of all actors working together as an artistic unit. In this way, actors in Inspector General used their own memories in order to express their emotions in the most natural way.

However, the whole question of affective memory is does not effectively suffice and arguably, it does not becomes an  essential tool in the actors kit because it is more draining on the part of the actor since at times it requires that an actor uses his private and often painful memories..A less draining way of accessing emotions which will emphasis the actors use of imagination as well as belief in the given milieu of the text can be used instead.

Another important component of Stanislavsky is the method of physical action. Accordingly, actors are bound to analyze and experience subjective emotions as well as feeling and then manifest them to their audience .This of course uses both vocal and physical means in the context of theatre language. As a result, Gogol in Inspector General used this system to focus on creating truthful emotions and eventually embody them in performance. The method of physical action works like emotions memory in reverse and predominantly focuses on the physical actions inspiring truthful emotions. Gogol improvised his performance to aim at reaching the subconscious through the conscious.

To recap, Gogols performance of the Inspector General embodies the comic and dramatic techniques which make this play as the greatest comedy in the Russian language. From the foregoing discussion, it is evident that Gogols Inspector General begins with a blinding flash of lightening and ends in a thunder clap. this play can thus be described as a power type metaphor because it builds speed from the beginning and by the end of the play, the feverish speed  bursts of f the stage and crushes through the walls of the theatre thus leaving the audience to depart through the would. As such, Gogol draws these theatrical skills fro m the Stanislavskys approach to dramatic text and theatrical production.