Anyone who wants to credibly transfer a historical play to the present had better be radical, director Theu Boermans must have thought. And anyone who has seen his adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's The Revisor at the National Theatre cannot help but agree with him. With references to asylum seekers, cubicle snoopers, data espionage and subsidy fraud, the play seems written yesterday. Yet Boermans stays true to the essence of the 19e century original. Like Gogol, he ridicules everything and everyone: the civil service, corruption, the church, but also pompous stage managers and even his own successful musical Soldier of Orange.
'Everyone got by on it, and me most of all!' the tsar is reported to have said, chuckling, after the premiere of The Revisor in 1836. But Gogol did not just mock the corrupt Petersburg bureaucracy. Above all, he showed that the flesh in every person is weak if the temptation is great enough. And temptations are of all times.
The story
In a small town in the Dutch countryside, the town council manages its own affairs superbly, until the arrival of a state inspector (a 'revisor') is announced. Panicking, the administrators mistakenly mistake a random stranger for the revisor and pamper him. When the visitor, played with great flair by Joris Smit, understands the fork in the road, he grows into his role and unscrupulously indulges in flattery, bribery, dinner parties and the love of the mayor's daughter.
Actor plays actor
Boermans has added extra layers in his adaptation for the Nationale Toneel. For instance, the so-called revisor is in reality not a simple office worker, as in Gogol's case, but a playwright called Olaf de Heer. Who elaborates on the true arts as a counterpoint to the earthly, but also uses his theatrical talents to cheat with increasing conviction. This goes so far that he claims to have written Kluun's books and the musical Soldier of Orange, under a pseudonym. Finally, he gives meaning to the surname "De Heer" when, singing musical-style, he plays the swinging Messiah in the midst of his admirers.
Cuddle asylum seeker
A second adaptation concerns De Heer's travelling servant. In Boerman's case, he became the asylum seeker Osman (a sometimes touching, sometimes hilarious Mark Rietman). Osman worked on a theatre project: forty real asylum seekers on a turntable for six hours ('as a metaphor for the mill they end up in'). Until De Heer gambled away his grant money even before the premiere. Osman becomes the cuddly asylum seeker in the town that absolutely does not want an AZC. He actually wants to return to Damascus, but finds a connection with the mayor's childlike eldest daughter, a subdued role by Hannah Hoekstra. An interest in each other's faith brings the two together.
Playing right through the story is the amateur musical Noah's Ark, for which the town is rehearsing. Instead, with Boermansian spectacle, the animal kingdom crawls grunting and strutting around a makeshift Mount Ararat, when an intercepted email from the auditor makes it clear to the press that they have all been swindled.
Much of the National Theatre's ensemble gets a chance to indulge in this comedy. Smit gets excellent performances from Stefan de Walle as the paternal yet vicious mayor and Antoinette Jelgersma as the mayor's wife competing with her jilted daughter (Diewertje Dir) for the favour and desire of the auditor. Also strong are Dries Vanhegen and Betty Schuurman as bickering aldermen of PVV and PvdA.
Southern accent
Point of doubt is the accent with which the actors speak. In a interview in door-to-door newspaper De Posthoorn (page 17) actress Betty Schuurman said it would be lame to speak Limburgish. Therefore, it had to be a Drenthe accent. Somewhere in the try-outs, that Drents accent apparently still fell in favour of a more southern sound. 'Oh Chod,' cries the mayor when he hears the arrival of the reviser. One wonders if that adds anything to the performance. Against a laugh-out-loud moment at the beginning, there are many where intelligibility is at stake. At the back of the auditorium, the actors are often hard to follow when they speak interchangeably with accents. And the underlying message that power corrupts, always and everywhere, is weakened by a pointing finger south.
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Yet The reviewer especially a great success for Theu Boermans. His daring vision makes the play today's theatre. A comedy that is really very funny and more topical than, for instance, Shakespearean comedies with their rather complex intrigues and dei ex machina. And a comedy for anyone whose flesh is occasionally weak. As we left the hall, I heard a government official - czar or boar of our time - mutter, 'This is where we have to take the whole club!'
- Seen: 16 January 2016. Tour until 5 March.
- Note! Reprise from 22 to 28 December 2017
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