A LITTLE LOCAL DIFFICULTY. To 14 June.
Oldham
A LITTLE LOCAL DIFFICULTY
by Philip Goulding adapted from The Government Inspector
Coliseum Theatre To 14 June 2003
Mon-Thu/Sat 7.30pm Fri 8pm Mat 7.14 June 2.30pm
Audio-described 11 June
BSL Signed 3 June
Runs 2hr 35min One interval
TICKETS: 0161 624 2829
www.coliseum.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 May, 2003
Lively fun poked at civic corruption.Dickens would have denounced them thunderously, this mid-Victorian council, while presenting them individually as grotesques. In Russia, Nikolai Gogol focused on the grotesque, using mockery rather than thunder - till the very end. Fearing the state's caught up with them in Gogol's Government Inspector an out-of-the-wayville civic gang use mass bribery to buy their way out of trouble.
But Gogol goes further, slamming with laughter a gamut of human folly and self-deception, in the agent of retribution as well. He's no inspector calling, but a gambling-impoverished clerk mistaken for a man of importance incognito.
Philip Goulding's Lancashire adaptation (he's also done one for the West Country) suffers only slightly in the transposition: in the bourgeois democracy of mid-19th century England it's hard to conceive of a Mayor oppressing the shopkeeper class he'd most likely have emerged from (what the shopkeepers might feel about Mayoral policies is a different matter).
Goulding's adaptation is vigorous and pointed. It doesn't have the crazy logic of another piece of localised monkeying about with Euro-classics, Blake Morrison's Kleist-derived The Cracked Pot. And, for all Eric Potts' rough humour as the Mayor, there's a predictability to the character keeping it out of the class creation Barrie Rutter made of Morrison's equivalent figure.
Yet it pays that East-Pennine piece back insult for insult from the western hillside, and there's a set of characterful performances, especially the women, in the rivalry between mother and daughter in the Mayor's parlour for the attentions and affections of the delightfully-named Petty. Tim Treslove's clerk can't believe his luck; there's a lovely contrast to the surrounding energy when, taken for an important official, he describes the humble life of a clerk.
If there's sometimes an over-rich feel to the satire, so there is in Gogol. One way, at least, this version seems an improvement: the twins Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky become the cross-cutting, bickering Robsons, husband and wife. Sue McCormick and Rob Parry play the double-act marvellously.
Add Alison Heffernan's gorgeously witty set, a crazy-angled compilation of terraced houses and factory chimneys, half-blotted out by manic-perspective civic building grandeur, with hints of pompous wallpaper – plus Kevin Shaw's surefooted direction - and a theatrical machine's set up which will surely fly higher as the laughs keep coming nightly.
Mrs Robson/Sergeant’s Widow: Sue McCormick
Joseph/Postmaster/Policeman: Steve Owen
Mr Robson/Shopkeeper: Rob Parry
Anna/Smithee’s Wife: Kerry Peers
Mayor Wyndham Pitts: Eric Potts
Rose Quigley/Maria: Eve Steele
John Petty/Official Messenger: Tim Treslove
Philip Stein/Albert Markham/Waiter/Shopkeeper: Johnson Willis
Director: Kevin Shaw
Designer: Alison Heffernan
Lighting: Phil Davies
Sound: Anna Holly
Composer/Musical Director: Richard Atkinson
2003-05-27 23:56:30