Prompt Pack: The Government Inspector

Prompt Pack // an educational resource.

Malthouse Theatre and Belvoir present

The Government Inspector By / Simon Stone with Emily Barclay; devised with the cast Featuring / a short musical by Stefan Gregory Inspired by / Nikolai Gogol The Coopers Malthouse, Merlyn Theatre 28 February - 23 March 2014

Prompt Pack compiled by Clare Watson for Malthouse Theatre Youth and Education Program copyright 2014 1

CONTENTS page 3 . . . Cast and creative team

page 9 . . . Design: costume, lighting, set, sound

page 4 . . . Introduction to the Prompt Pack

page 14 . . . Montage

page 4 . . . Synopsis

page 15 . . . Play structures

page 5 . . . Artistic Director Marion Potts program note

page 16 . . . Writing: know your Russians

page 6 . . . About Director Simon Stone

page 18 . . . Language and the play within the play

page 7 . . . About Playwright Nikolai Gogol page 8 . . . Two plays: The Government Inspector and The Philapdelphia Story

page 17 . . . Comedy page 19 . . . Time and dance page 20 . . . Characters and cast page 26 . . . Provocations from the audience

VIDEO LINKS

CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM

Watch Writer and Director Simon Stone talking about The Government Inspector

By / Simon Stone with Emily Barclay; devised with the cast

Watch Set Designer Ralph Myers discussing the set of The Government Inspector

Inspired by / Nikolai Gogol

Watch Composer and Sound Designer Stefan Gregory talking about music in the show Watch Malthouse Theatre Artistic Director Marion Potts talking the show Watch actor Zahra Newman talk about playing the character of Zahra Watch actors Gareth Davies and Mitchell Butel discuss the play

Featuring / a short musical by Stefan Gregory Direction / Simon Stone Set Design / Ralph Myers Lighting Design / Paul Jackson Sound Design & Composition / Stefan Gregory Choreography / Lucy Guerin Costume Design / Mel Page Cast / Fayssal Bazzi, Mitchell Butel, Gareth Davies, Robert Menzies, Zahra Newman, Eryn-Jean Norvill, Greg Stone

ABOUT MALTHOUSE THEATRE Malthouse Theatre is at once a treasured building, a theatre company, a creative site and an engine for change. It is also the imaginative expression of a committed team of artmakers reaching out to an even larger number of local, national and international artists. All are dedicated to an ongoing conversation with audiences of exciting diversity and character.

This conversation chooses contemporary theatre as its vehicle: a compelling annual program of adventurous, multi-disciplinary work inspired by writers, directors, designers, choreographers, audio artists and performers. Here, the combined possibilities of all theatre arts are offered centre stage – for entertainment, for inspiration, and even for fun.

EMILY BARCLAY

FAYSSAL BAZZI

MITCHELL BUTEL

GARETH DAVIES

STEFAN GREGORY

lucy guerin

paul jackson

robert menzies

ralph myers

ZAHRA NEWMAN

The Government Inspector is created in coproduction with Belvoir. After the season at The Coopers Malthouse has finished the production will be bumped into Belvoir for a season in Sydney.

eryn-jean norvill mel page

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GREG STONE

SIMON STONE

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Prompt – cue, induce, make, motivate, persuade, encourage, stimulate, impel, inspire.

Welcome to the Malthouse Theatre Prompt Pack for The Government Inspector. When an actor forgets a line in rehearsals they may call for a prompt to provide a clue or a cue so that they can keep telling the story. This document aims to provide just that – a next step, a reminder, a series of provocations. It is full of information but also poses many questions of the audience. The Prompt Pack invites us to see how relevant and exciting contemporary theatre can be. As a resource, these pages are by no means definitive but we hope they’ll take you on an interesting journey and keep you travelling through the world of the play well after the curtain call. And, who knows where you’ll end up?

The Government Inspector // proves you can fake it ’til you make it

Synopsis

The Government Inspector / was never meant to happen. Our season opener, The Philadelphia Story, was set to be the theatrical hit of the summer, with its star-studded cast and hot young director. Until the rights suddenly fell through.

Enter The Government Inspector – though not the play you might be expecting.

This production is presented in three clear acts:

Based loosely on the Nikolai Gogol play of the same name, this new amalgam goes something like this: Just weeks out from opening night, an ensemble of actors is presented with the script for a play they were never supposed to perform.

To save the day, a star director is shipped in from St Petersburg. But is he really who he seems? The media throng sniffing around the production since they got a whiff of the whole calamity is sure to uncover the truth.

A chaotic comedy of errors that deconstructs Gogol’s original, The Government Inspector will have you questioning where reality ends and theatricality begins. In the hands of a stellar cast and the ever-inventive Simon Stone, this postmodern mash-up will be a laugh-out-loud game of pretend.

Like Gogol’s imposter protagonist, this production / proves you can fake it ’til you make it.

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ACT 1 The actors cast in a production of The Philadelphia Story discover they no longer have the rights to perform the play. Then their director quits. They seek the talents of a much celebrated Uzbekestani Theatre Director who is renowned for a production of The Government Inspector. Just when things couldn’t get worse, an actor dies. Another actor arrives and is encouraged to improvise using the “Yes, And…” technique. What ensues is a case of mistaken identity.

ACT 2 The actor, mistaken for the famous director, proceeds to direct the play. Which, as he learns, is not too difficult. His identity is finally discovered.

Dolores reveals that she has written a play.

ACT 3 The Government Inspector, a musical, jazz hands, glitter falls.

The program notes, written by Malthouse Theatre’s Artistic Director Marion Potts, offer an excellent sense of the context of this work, which is essentially three plays in one.

Simon Stone – and in fact all of the artists he’s brought together for this show – know how to smell the immediacy of an idea and zero in on its theatrical potential. It takes a particular kind of creative drive to recognise and wrestle down the Zeitgeist, especially when it’s borne of one project being suddenly substituted for another.

As many of you know, this season’s opening production was going to be The Philadelphia Story

by Philip Barry.

Late last year we were contacted about the rights to The Philadelphia Story. Much to our surprise and despite our own legal checks we received a letter, stating that we were unable to proceed with the production. It seems that Philip Barry had a cowriter: his wife.

If Ellen Barry were a co-copyright holder we would have been able to proceed under Australian law.

As a co-writer, however, Ellen has the rights that every spouse who contributes to the authorship of a piece should. Despite never being acknowledged in this capacity in print, nor by Philip in interviews or associated media (that we have been able to unearth, at least), it appears that Ellen was in fact the co-author of the piece. We are very glad that she has at last been credited, at least in this roundabout way.

It was a bit of a bombshell for us though, to be suddenly faced with the need to substitute a show at the last minute ... but: this prompted a series of questions that felt important, and that started to assert their own dramatic possibilities. What does constitute plagiarism or an abuse of copyright?

What is the relationship between an original work and its stimulus? Is a story, a song or even a dance any the less original for being the product of a rich context and tradition? How do we acknowledge the myriad influences that find their way into our stories and then splinter off into our everyday lives? Is it in fact possible to create anything meaningful without referencing our collective culture? These questions started to claim their time on stage.

What The Philadelphia Story and The Government Inspector have in common is that their characters are hiding things: personal or political corruption that mustn’t be made public and that they must lie about. There’s a fine line between an outright lie and a white lie, or a white lie and a lie of omission, or just a plain old bending of the truth. These shades exist on a spectrum. Like the characters in The Government Inspector, like those in The Philadelphia Story, or like a director who’s trying to rehearse a show, how much we ‘fake it to make it’ is up for grabs.

Imposters, fraudsters and fakers all work on a sliding scale largely determined by the opportunities they’re presented with and the ones they grab. In the realm of intellectual property, this finds a parallel between what’s authentic or copied, what’s an original or a fake. Likewise the spectrum is vast and includes influences, interpretations, quotes, references, homages, tributes and sheer imitation, right through to outright plagiarism.

The extent to which we can reimagine, reinterpret, and draw on cultural references and other sources of inspiration, is in fact a measure of cultural wealth. It’s a fine thing that a young director wants to re-interpret a play that was written in Russia some one hundred-and-forty years before he was born. Or that he can see in our repertoire an imaginative opportunity – the launching-pad for an immediate, topical (as well as universal) investigation.

There were many films, novels, plays, productions, aesthetics, styles and genres mentioned in the course of making this version of The Government Inspector, which riffs so big-heartedly on the idea of fraudulent identity and behaviour. And whilst none of these are quoted directly, many of them have seeped into the fabric of this piece and have become part of its original DNA. It’s a joyous celebration of the opportunistic and the gullible in us all – and the simple pleasure of making an audience laugh. So not so far away from Gogol after all.

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ABOUT THE DIRECTOR: SIMON STONE

ABOUT THE INSPIRATION: NIKOLAI GOGOL

It may also be interesting to have a sense of how this particular production fits into Simon Stone’s body of work. An artist’s series of work reflect the times that they live in and the life that they’re leading, their works are often in ‘conversation’ with one another.

Simon Stone’s The Government Inspector has the same name, but is not the same play as Nikolai Gogol’s version. He used Nikolai Gogol’s play, written in 1836, as a starting point to create something new.

IO

ARTIST B

Simon trained as an actor at the Victorian College of the Arts. After graduating, he founded The Hayloft Project, for whom he made work including Spring Awakening, Platonov, 3xSisters, The Only Child and The Suicide, as well as directing Rita Kalnejais’ debut play B.C. His final work for Hayloft was Thyestes, a co-production with Malthouse Theatre. Simon was Belvoir’s Resident Director from 2011 to 2013, where he wrote and directed The Wild Duck (after Ibsen), Strange Interlude (after O’Neill), wrote Miss Julie (after Strindberg), and directed Neighbourhood Watch, Death of A Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Hamlet. He also co-adapted and directed Baal (Malthouse Theatre/Sydney Theatre Company) and Face to Face (Sydney Theatre Company) and adapted and directed Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (Melbourne Theatre Company). In Germany, he recently wrote and directed Die Orestie (after Aeschylus) for Theater Oberhausen. On screen Simon directed Reunion, a short film written by Andrew Upton and starring Cate Blanchett, which forms part of the feature film The Turning. Simon’s acting credits include the feature films Being Venice, The Eye of the Storm, Blame, Balibo, Kokoda and Jindabyne, along with many television credits.

On stage he performed in Benedict Andrews’ production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Belvoir. Simon’s work has been nominated for and won several Green Room, Sydney Theatre and Helpmann Awards.

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ACTIVITY: STONE IN THE MEDIA

‘It has been said that Gogol's career was like that of a meteor. It appears suddenly, burns brightly, fades quickly, and with its impact, changes the surrounding landscape and environment forever.’

Articles www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2012/ may/1339649879/benjamin-law/hurtling-stone

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born in the Mirgorod district of ‘Little Russia’ later called Ukraine in 1809. His early life was spent on his father's country estate. Gogol's father is a celebrated Ukrainian writer, much of whose work was written for puppet theatres. He wrote in Ukrainian. His son, however, decided to write in Russian. Nikolai Gogol moved to St Petersburg in 1828 with the intention of becoming a professional writer.

His first published work gained no traction, and the sensitive Gogol fled from Russia in shame.

Apparently, with his Mother’s savings which he was meant to put down as a payment on her property.

When he returned from Europe in 1829, Gogol tried and failed to find work as an actor. Eventually and begrudgingly he took a minor post in the civil service. His experiences in the government bureaucracy are reflected in much of his writing.

Prominent directors are often profiled in the media, and their work discussed, praised and criticised. Check out these news stories:

www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-cultureblog/2013/aug/09/simon-stone-theatre-director www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/arts/ simon-stone-talks-hysterics-ahead-of-hismelbourne-theatre-company-debut/storyfni0fcgk-1226697964914 Documentary www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s3849926.htm

From 1831, Gogol began publishing his short stories and was met with critical success. His most famous story is The Overcoat.

In 1836, Gogol's The Government Inspector was first staged. It met both praise and criticism. As he had done after the failure of his first work, Gogol

fled the country. He spent most of the next six years abroad. He reportedly grew more and more eccentric and suffered hypochondria.

During the 1840s Gogol experienced a religious awakening. He became convinced that the writing of fiction was an inherently sinful enterprise, and he feared for the safety of his soul. He wrote essays emphasising the religious connotations of his previous writings and even burned a manuscript, just prior to his death, of his work Dead Souls. He began a religious fast and refused to eat or drink. He starved himself to death in February, 1852.

Activity: GOGOL’S LIFE

If you’re interested to read about Gogol’s life in more detail, this article is a good read: www.russianlife.com/paulerichardson/gogol.cfm And if you’re interested in reading the full original Gogol script (there are a number of translations available on line), you can find it here: www.taghawaii.net/Inspector_General.pdf 7

TWO PLAYS: THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR AND THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

DESIGN

NIKOLAI GOGOL’S THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

PHILIP BARRY’S The Philadelphia Story

Gogol asked his friend and mentor, Pushkin, to give him a funny story, and with it he promised to write the funniest play ever written. Pushkin offered him an anecdote from his own life, when he was the subject of a case of mistaken identity.

Tracy Lord, a well-to-do socialite, on the eve of her wedding, is visited by her ex-husband who brings with him an undercover tabloid journalist to document the wedding in the social pages.

‘Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord.’

– NIKOLAI Gogol

The mayor of the town is notified that an Inspector is coming to town. The mayor calls a town meeting of the local dignitaries and instructs them how to make a good impression on the official from St Petersburg. There are a number of bribes and underhanded dealings that the town would like to keep under wraps. Each of the townsfolk clean up their act in a different way in order to impress the Inspector. The hospital manager puts signs in Latin over each bed and stop the patients from smoking.

One of the men working in the courtroom eats garlic to hide the scent of brandy on his breath.

A stranger arrives, and everyone assumes he is the Inspector. The stranger, who rather enjoys being given such a cordial welcome, settles into his mistaken identity as the townsfolk jump through various hoops to please him.

The 1940s American romantic comedy was first a stage production and later a multi Academy Award winning film. Katherine Hepburn, who played the lead role in the stage play bought the film rights.

She was cast in the role of Tracy Lord, the star of the story: a sensational, strong, witty, sizzling woman. The script is full of biting one liners and the costumes are to die for.

The world of the play is quite complex. It is both on stage and off stage. And then the actors literally step off the stage making the entire theatre effectively the set. In The Government Inspector, we are witness to a funeral home from a 1940s Hollywood film, a Soviet laundry and the stage and dressing rooms of The Government Inspector the musical. With various layers of reality at work, the designers are each creating a series of worlds that fit within each other – a bit like a babushka doll.

The bi-line for the film when it was first released was: Broadway’s Howling Year-Long Comedy Hit of the Snooty Society Beauty Who Slipped and Fell - IN LOVE. The film proved to be Hepburn’s comeback film following several flops that had earned her the title ‘box office poison.’

When it is finally revealed that he is not the Inspector after all, the townsfolk are up in arms.

And then the real Inspector arrives.

‘Mood boards’ of design and inspiration references are used in the rehearsal room to inform decisions about the look and feel of sets, lighting and costumes.

Actors Gareth Davies and Zahra Newman in rehearsal. Zahra was originally cast as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story; her role like everyone else’s was changed for The Government Inspector.

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COSTUME DESIGN

ARTIST BIO

Consider the challenge faced by Mel Page, the Costume Designer, who is creating costumes for actor’s playing themselves. This reality of costumes are being refered to as ‘civvies’ and are based on what the actor’s were wearing in the rehearsal room. They are still, absolutely designed costumes and have to aesthetically work together and provide key information about each character.

It’s surprisingly difficult to deign costumes that don’t look designed.

Mel is a Victorian College of the Arts graduate.

For Malthouse Theatre Mel has designed costumes for Pompeii L.A. and Baal. Other costume credits include: Once In Royal David’s City, Hamlet, Angels in America Parts 1 & 2, Strange Interlude, As You Like It and The Promise (Belvoir); The Suicide, The Only Child, Spring Awakening (Belvoir/The Hayloft Project); Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pygmalion (Sydney Theatre Company); Vs. Macbeth (Sydney Theatre Company /The Border Project) and The Nest (The Hayloft Project). Mel has also designed set and costumes for Night Maybe (Theatre Works); Small and Tired, Medea and Old Man (Belvoir) The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy (Stuck Pigs Squealing/Melbourne Theatre Company) and the set for Noye’s Fludde (Victorian Opera).

SET DESIGN Ralph Myers is Belvoir’s Artistic Director and Set Designer of this production. For Belvoir he has directed Peter Pan, directed and designed Private Lives, and designed Coranderrk, Hamlet, Stories I Want to Tell You in Person, Death of a Salesman, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, The Seagull, The Wild Duck, Measure for Measure, Toy Symphony, Parramatta Girls, Ray’s Tempest, The Spook, The Fever, Conversations with the Dead and The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union. Ralph’s other credits include The City, A Streetcar Named Desire, Blackbird, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Kind of Alaska/Reunion, The Lost Echo, Mother

ARTIST BIO Courage and Her Children, Boy Gets Girl, This Little Piggy, Far Away, Morph, Endgame, The 7 Stages of Grieving and Frankenstein, which he also directed (Sydney Theatre Company); Enlightenment, Cruel and Tender, Dinner, Frozen (Melbourne Theatre Company); Othello (Bell Shakespeare); Wonderlands (Griffin Theatre Company/Hothouse Theatre Company); Borderlines, Sweet Phoebe (Griffin Theatre Company); Eora Crossing (Legs on the Wall/Sydney Festival); Black Box (Ballet de l’Opera de Lyon); Caligula (English National Opera); Peter Grimes, Così fan tutte (Opera Australia); La Bohème (New Zealand Opera); and Two Faced Bastard (Chunky Move).

LIGHTING DESIGN ARTIST BIO

PAUL JACKSON Lighting and Set Designer

Paul was an Associate Artist at Malthouse Theatre from 2007 to 2013. He has designed lighting for Malthouse Theatre, The Australian Ballet, Royal New Zealand Ballet, Melbourne Theatre Company, West Australian Ballet, Victorian Opera, West Australian Opera, Sydney Theatre Company, Belvoir, BalletLab, Lucy Guerin Inc, World of Wearable Art New Zealand, La Mama, Not Yet It’s Difficult, Chamber Made Opera, and many others.

Paul’s work has featured in festivals in Asia, Europe and the UK, and he has lectured in design at the University of Melbourne, RMIT University and Victorian College of the Arts. Paul has received a number of Green Room Awards and nominations for design, as well as receiving the 2012 Helpmann Award for lighting design. He was named in The Bulletin’s Smart 100 for 2004 and was the Gilbert Spottiswood Churchill Fellow for 2007.

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‘The lighting design of the third act plays with the angles and shadows of the Weimer Cabaret and the colour saturation of the camp kitsch of Moulin Rouge.’

– PAUL JACKSON 11

SET DESIGN

SOUND DESIGN

Excerpts from an interview with Ralph DURING REHEARSALS On working with a director: When you’re a set designer you work with all sorts of different directors, some of whom just say ‘show me something’ but Simon is very prescriptive. He finds that figuring out the set design helps him into the play. Frequently, he designs the set before he writes. So he’s obviously very involved, it’s a pleasure to work as a set designer with someone like that because you know that what you’re making is going to be well integrated into the show. The only way, in my opinion to be a good set designer is to be involved in rehearsals a lot and to not be precious.

Design challenges: There’s only one entrance into the space (on stage).

Because it’s being used largely at the top and the tail of each scene as soon as the wall is revolving every exit becomes an entrance somewhere else, namely on the other side of the wall…so there is a problem in making that work.

On a celebration of chaos: The design, actually, oddly enough, is quite naturalistic, it has a lot of details and a lot of props, stuff in it. The play is about things going wrong and that’s funny if there’s stuff in it, if you’re going to choke on an almond, you have to take a whole costume rack with you. So, because it’s comedy, there’s a lot of stuff which is fun but tricky as a designer because you have to find all of the things, make sure they work, stack and store them.

On Act 3: The musical part of the production, the third act, will be pretty Miss Saigon. Which is fun, because we never make that sort of theatre. We’re all enjoying flicking the switch to Vaudeville.

On the flexibility of designing for two venues: Belvoir is a really idiosyncratic theatre space, it’s assymetrical, it looks like a kite, it has audience on three sides. So designing for that space and the Merlyn is tricky because they are similar in some ways but they are more different than they are alike. So I design it for Belvoir first, because it’s the harder one and design backwards to the Merlyn, even though we’re playing that first.

On what this show is: I think in the end, you could say it’s a critique of theatre in Australia at the moment. So in each of the three big set changes are each a cliché or representation of a genre of Australian design or theatre practice. I’ve been a designer for 12 or 13 years, so I’ve done all of those extremes. The first set is a for a period production of The Philadelphia Story, the second set is a parody of a European theatre aesthetic of the 90s where everything is very hard and things are mysteriously set in locations that there’s no connection to. There’s no explanation why this production is set in a laundromat with a public phone in it. The third one is ultimately the show they have to do, its theatrical language is cheesy and deliberately camp and joyous. I think all three of them should be quite beautiful, they’ll be good examples of each genre.

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ARTIST B

IO

Stefan Gregory is the Composer and Sound Designer for The Government Inspector. His work for Malthouse Theatre includes Wild Duck (also Belvoir and International Ibsen Festival, Norway), Baal (Helpmann Award nomination for Best Sound Design) and Thyestes (also Hayloft Project, Sydney Theatre Award for Best Score or Sound Design, Green Room Award nomination for Best Sound Design). His other work includes The Cherry Orchard for Melbourne Theatre Company; Hamlet, Forget Me Not, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peter Pan, Private Lives, Medea, Death of a Salesman, Old Man, Strange Interlude, B Street, As You Like It, The Seagull, Measure for Measure

(Sydney Theatre Award nomination for Best Score or Sound Design), and That Face for Belvoir; Face to Face, Money Shots and Dance Better At Parties, War Of The Roses for Sydney Theatre Company; King Lear, Hamlet and Othello for Bell Shakespeare; Symphony for Sydney Festival and Legs on the Wall; Infinity – There Is Definitely a Prince Involved for the Australian Ballet; and Citizens Band, an installation by Angelica Mesiti (ACCA). Stefan was a band member of Faker until 2008, where he earned a platinum single and several ARIA nominations. He was recently awarded a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship.

excerpts from an interview WITH STEFAN DURING REHEARSALS

The accompaniment will be simple backing tracks, I guess with the idea that they could have come up with them at the last minute so there’ll be a humour to their simplicity but at the same time they should allow us to suspend disbelief because they are actually quite good. Simple, a bit cheesy, but actually really great tracks is my intention.

The music is quite important in this show because it’s the climax of the show. The last 20 minutes is a musical and is where the plot pay-offs happen. It’s all told through music, almost. So it’s quite important, and tricky!

The songs in the musical are original, you might recognise a few things (there is one Russian folk song). The idea is that it’s a musical that has been written by one of the characters. The style is contemporary cheese! It’s supposed to reference a number of different styles but we’re referencing some of the classic style 1930s musicals – Singing in the Rain, Gilbert and Sullivan… High Society is fantastic.

A lot of what I’ve summoned up to make this comes from the depths of my memory, an impression of the genre. I’ve deliberately tried to not go back and listen to some of those songs.

There are parallels in the musical to the play itself, so to bring those out the performance styles are matched. There’s a lot of moments that happen in the musical that are mirrored by the play, that were original plot points in Gogol’s Government Inspector. Because I’ve been writing these songs, a lot of the considerations I had were about telling the story of The Government Inspector. Most of the people seeing the show wouldn’t have seen or read the Gogol play before, we don’t want it to be totally bamboozling. So I’ve done my best to present a thread of the original plot.

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montage From Russia we have inherited vodka, babushka dolls, some of the world’s greatest works of literature and the montage.

Montage is the practice of putting two or more non-linear images or moments side by side and allowing the audience to make meaning through their connection.

If, for example, we saw an image of a kitten followed by an image of an on-coming train, the narrative-driven human mind connects the dots and we are left with the imagined outcome, kitten jam.

The word ‘montage’ derives from the French verb monter, ‘to set up, to assemble or to organise.’

Sergei Eisenstein, mostly known today for his film work, was first a stage director and he developed a practice he eventually called ‘the montage of attractions.’ In his essay 'The dramaturgy of film form,’ he described montage as not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that comes from the collision of two shots that are independent of one another.

STRUCTURE AND STYLE The concept was named and defined by Eisenstein in 1923, but Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1942), the innovative Russian stage director who’d been Eisenstein’s teacher and mentor, was clearly employing the technique as early as 1918.

‘I have come to regard the mise en scène not as something which works directly on the spectator but rather as a series of ‘passes’, each intended to evoke some association or other in the spectator . . . Your imagination is activated, your fantasy stimulated, and a whole chorus of associations is set off. A multitude of accumulated associations gives birth to new worlds . . . You can no longer distinguish between what the director is responsible for and what is inspired by the associations which have invaded your imagination. A new world is created, quite separate from the fragments of life from which the [piece] is composed.’

– Vsevolod Meyerhold Adapted from source: rickontheater.blogspot. com.au/2010/01/eisensteins-theory-ofattractions.html

The play is structured in three acts, each act has adopted a distinct theatrical style. It is a piece of theatre about theatre, which is constantly commenting, referencing and borrowing from other plays, productions and even films. There are many references to the current theatre landscape of Australia (particularly of Sydney and Melbourne, where most of the artists live and work).

Discuss

• Did you identify any references to other plays or films that you have seen?

• Did you catch any references to other actors?

• The play is obviously referencing Gogol’s The Government Inspector and The Philadelphia Story, did you pick up references within the production?

ACTOR AUDIENCE RELATIONSHIP Discuss

• How would you define the world of the play in The Government Inspector?

• Is the fourth wall intact?

• Does the actor audience relationship change throughout the production? Why? • Are there any moments of direct address?

Mitch: Do I acknowledge these people? I mean, can I see them?

Frank: What you say? Of course you can see them.

Mitch: Sorry I mean my character, Khlestakov, can he see them? Because in the original play, the scene’s played in private, obviously we’ve fused all the locations into one, but are we playing the same reality or separate realities in the same space?

• Are there any moments in which the audience are endowed with a character/role?

• Where does the stage begin and end?

STAGE ACTION Mitch: Yeah, I’ve studied the blocking.

Frank: The what?

Mitch: The blocking, the moves.

Frank: Oh good, then you do it.

The script of The Government Inspector that you have read doesn’t suggest much blocking for the actors. Can you find any examples of clear stage directions within the script?

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Discuss

• How fixed do you feel the blocking is? Might it change from night to night?

• How might an actor annotate their blocking in a script?

• If the show had to be recast, how might a new actor learn the blocking in this, or any production?

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KNOW YOUR RUSSIANS

COMEDY ACTIVITY

Gogol, though born in Ukraine, is considered a Russian writer and there have been a number of other Russians mentioned and quoted throughout this Prompt Pack.

Two very different performance methodologies were pioneered by Russian artists.

Find out who the following people were and what they did:

Research Meyerhold and Stanislavski. Can you match any aspects of this production of The Government Inspector to either of these theatre artists performance styles?

• Alexander Pushkin • Fyodor Dostoyevsky • Sergei Eisenstein • Leo Tolstoy • Vladimir Nabokov

‘The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.’

– Nikolai Gogol In all great comedy, there is an element of tragedy.

Discuss

• Where does the humour come from in The Government Inspector?

• Is there any tragedy present?

• Meyerhold’s production of this work was considered a tragicomedy. What is the difference between a comedy and a tragicomedy?

(L-R) Greg Stone, Mitchell Butel and Simon Stone.

‘Does anyone know what any of this production means? I need some… some motivation, it’s like he’s avoiding answering any of our questions and I’m sorry but I need to know why I’m doing what I’m doing.’

– Eryn-Jean

EMILY BARCLAY Writer

ARTIST

BIO

Emily’s theatre credits include Hamlet, Strange Interlude, The Seagull, That Face and Gethsemane (Belvoir); The Three Sisters (The Young Vic); This is Our Youth (Sydney Opera House); and The Importance of Being Earnest (Melbourne Theatre Company). Her film credits include Love Birds, Lou, Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, Prime Mover, Suburban Mayhem and In My Father’s Den. Her television credits include Lowdown, Piece of My Heart and The Silence. Emily received a British Independent Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer and a New Zealand Screen Award for Best Actor for In My Father’s Den, an Australian Film Institute Award and Inside Film Best Actress Award for Suburban Mayhem, and Logie and AFI Award nominations for her role in The Silence.

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TIME

LANGUAGE ‘Often the way I rewrite these stories is I restructure them or I find a new form for them first. More often than not, I am trying to find a language that is recognisable in the everyday. So the audience sees themselves on stage.’

– Simon Stone

‘The wide social spectrum of that play, the recognisable "Russianness" of its characters, its richly colloquial language the likes of which had never before been heard on the Russian stage, caused it to be hailed as a realisation of the dream of a national theater.

– Milton Ehre

Time, on stage, can be rather elastic. In some plays, there are large jumps in time, in others, the action jumps back and forth between time frames.

Discuss

Reknowned choreographer Lucy Guerin has choreographed the dances in Act 3. She is using a vocabulary that comes from Jazz – many of the shapes and movements are familiar from musicals of the 1940s – in a nod to the era and world which brought us The Philadelphia Story.

One of the things that most appealed to Russian audiences about this work in 1836 was the language it employed.

• Have you seen many plays in Australian idiom?

The characters, unlike many that had been seen on stage before then, actually spoke like real people.

• Do you feel the language of the play is an accurate representation of contemporary Australia?

Simon Stone has reworked a number of classical plays into Australian idiom.

• How is swearing used throughout the play? Is it, in your opinion, effective? Why/Why not?

THE PLAY WITHIN THE PLAY Activity

• Take a scene (or a series of scenes) from a well-known play. Develop the characters of the actors playing each role and improvise the scenes that might be occurring backstage between the scripted action.

• Collate a library of plays that exist within plays.

The play within the play gives this production much of its comedy, it allows the production to comment on both itself and on contemporary theatre more broadly.

The play within the play is a convention that we can trace all the way back to Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The shifting of action and focus between on-stage and off-stage has been referred to within the process of making The Government Inspector as ‘noises off’. Noises Off is a comedy written by Michael Frayn. The idea came to him when he watched a production of one of his plays from the wings. He said, ‘It was funnier from behind than in front, I thought that one day I must write a farce from behind.’

The LED screens help the audience know where we are in the timeline of the story, this convention is often used in film.

Activity

How does time operate in this production of The Government Inspector? Does this sense of time seem realistic? Are there any lines of dialogue that make particular reference to time?

Create a time line of events as they play out in the story.

DANCE

There is also a ‘Russian’ sequence, which plays with stereotypes of Russian dance. The movement sequences are simple and highly stylised. Can you identify: Unison? Canon? Repetition? Pas de Deux? Tableau?

Lucy Guerin Choreographer

ARTIST BIO

Born in Adelaide, Lucy Guerin graduated from the Centre for Performing Arts in 1982 before joining the companies of Russell Dumas (Dance Exchange) and Nanette Hassall (Danceworks). She moved to New York in 1989 for seven years, where she danced with Tere O’Connor Dance, the Bebe Miller Company and Sara Rudner. She returned to Australia in 1996 and worked as an independent artist, creating new dance works including Two Lies, Robbery Waitress on Bail, Heavy and The Ends of Things. In 2002 she established Lucy Guerin Inc in Melbourne to support the development, creation and touring of new works with a focus on challenging and extending the concepts and practice of contemporary dance.

Recent works include Untrained, Human Interest Story, Conversation Piece and Weather. Guerin has toured her work extensively in Europe, Asia and North America as well as to Australia’s major festivals and venues. She has had works commissioned by Chunky Move, Dance Works Rotterdam, Ricochet (UK), Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project (USA), the Lyon Opera Ballet (France) and has been invited to choreograph for the National Theatre (UK) in 2014. Her many awards include the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award, a New York Dance and Performance Award (a ‘Bessie’), several Green Room Awards, a Helpmann Award and an Australian Dance Award.

This production of The Government Inspector pays homage to Frayn’s idea and even follows the three act structure of Noises Off. 18

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CHARACTERS AND CAST ‘Theatre should entertain people not alienate them. I’m not playing a character. I’m just a fucking puppet.’

– MITCH For most of the production the actors are playing themselves, or rather, a version of themselves. They’ve developed a performance character using aspects of their own characters, emphasising some aspects and muting others. They have also added character motivations ‘needs’ or ‘wants’ that will promote the tension within the ensemble.

Some of the actors are also playing completely fictional characters, or indeed playing at playing fictional characters.

Activity

Write a full list of characters and a list of each character’s ‘needs’ or ‘wants’. Consider the ways in which each character develops or changes as the story unfolds.

FAYSSAL BAZZI Performer

MITCHELL BUTEL Performer

ARTIST BIO

For Malthouse Theatre, Mitchell has performed in Meow Meow's Little Match Girl and Woyzeck.

His other theatre credits includes: Romeo and Juliet, Face to Face, The Grenade, Summer Rain, Harbour, The Republic of Myopia, Holy Day, Mourning Becomes Electra, Tartuffe, Two Weeks with the Queen, Dead White Males, The Cafe Latte Kid, Summer of the Aliens, Six Degrees of Separation (Sydney Theatre Company); Angels in America, Strange Interlude, Snugglepot and Cuddle Pie, The Laramie Project, A View from the Bridge, Dead Heart (Belvoir); Tomfoolery, Urinetown, Piaf (Melbourne Theatre Company); Stones in His Pocket, The Venetian Twins (Queensland Theatre Company); Unidentified Human Remains (State Theatre Company of South Australia); Othello (Bell Shakespeare); South Pacific, Orpheus in the Underworld, The Mikado (Opera Australia); Boeing Boeing (New Theatricals); A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (Gordon Frost); Avenue Q (AAP); Dusty (Dusty Productions); The Producers, Kismet, Sugar, Little Me, Oklahoma, Hair (The Production Company); and Killing Time (Adelaide Cabaret Festival). TV: The Broken Shore, Mr & Mrs Murder, Rake, MDA, Gras Roots, Wildside, GP, Bordertown. Film: Gettin' Square, The Bank, Strange Fits of Passion, Two Hands. Awards: Helpmann Awards for The Mikado, Avenue Q and The Venetian Twins. Green Room Awards for Hair and Piaf.

ARTIST BIO

Fayssal’s recent theatre credits include: Look the Other Way (Sydney Theatre Company); Food (Belvoir); The Mother Fu*ker With the Hat (Black Swan Theatre Company); I Only Came To Use The Phone (Darlinghurst Theatre); The Pigeons and Lord of the Flies (Griffin Theatre Company), Woyzeck (Malthouse Theatre/Belvoir), Don Juan in Soho (New Theatre), Redemption, This Blasted Earth: A Christmas Miracle with Music, Poster Girl and Sprout (Old Fitzroy Theatre); All the Blood and All the Water (Riverside Theatre); Cross Sections (Sydney Opera House), To the Green Fields Beyond and Love, Madness and Poetry (Seymour Centre); and Empire: Terror on the High Seas (Bondi Pavilion Theatre).

His television and film credits include: The Elegant Gentleman's Guide to Knife Fighting, Tough Nuts, Crownies, The Strip, East West 101, Double the Fist, Stupid Stupid Man, All Saints, Emulsion and Cedar Boys.

GARETH DAVIES Performer

Gareth’s theatre credits include: Peter Pan (as well as its 2013 New York tour), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, As You Like It, And They Called Him Mr Glamour (which he also wrote) and The Seagull (Belvoir); The Only Child, The Suicide (Belvoir/The Hayloft Project); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Belvoir/ Bob Presents/Arts Radar); and The Cherry Orchard (Melbourne Theatre Company). He co-wrote and performed in Masterclass with Charlie Garber, and is a member of Melbourne’s Black Lung Theatre, collaborating on Avast and Avast II – The Welshman Cometh (Black Lung Theatre/Malthouse Theatre); Rubeville, Sugar, Pimms, I Feel Awful (Black Lung Theatre/Queensland Theatre Company); and Doku Rai (Black Lung Theatre/Darwin Festival) – a show devised and performed in collaboration with artists from East Timor.

ARTIST BIO 20

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Discuss

• How do passion and habit influence the portrayal of these characters?

• Is there a difference in perspective and behaviour between the younger and older characters/actors?

Consider, in particular, the character of Seyfat, the Director. Dramatic irony is at work, so that the audience knows that there is an actor playing the role of director even though the characters/actors he is directing doesn’t know that he is an actor. (If you haven’t seen it yet, this sentence will make a lot more sense once you have!) Consider the following quote by Stanislavski on directing a production of the Gogol play and how it relates to the character of Seyfat: ‘I began to order the actors about exactly as I ordered about amateurs. Of course they did not like it, but they obeyed, for they lost all ground beneath their feet. What I said and what I wanted was right. I saw the truth of that in the following years in many productions of The Government Inspector. But the means I used for attaining my new ideas and influencing the actors were not the right ones. Simple despotism does not persuade an actor to his inner self; it only violates his inner self.’

– Konstantin Stanislavski

ARTIST BIO

ROBERT MENZIES Performer

Robert has performed in productions with every major Australian theatre company including Malthouse Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company. Some of Robert’s performances include: Knives In Hens (Malthouse Theatre); The Wild Duck, The End (Malthouse Theatre/ Belvoir); The Threepenny Opera and Measure for Measure (Belvoir); The Cherry Orchard, Music, Queen Lear, Hamlet, Life Without Me and August: Osage County (Melbourne Theatre Company); and Fury, Gross Und Klein, War of the Roses and Reunion/A Kind of Alaska (Sydney Theatre Company). Robert’s film and television credits include The Doctor Blake Mysteries, Monash & the Anzac Legend, Satisfaction, Blue Heelers, The Society Murders, MDA, Backberner, Stingers, The Secret Life of Us, My Brother Jack, and 3 Acts of Murder for which he received an AFI Award nomination for Best Lead Actor in a Television Drama. Robert has received four Helpmann Award nominations, winning in 2005 for his role as Defoe in Journal of the Plague Year. He has also been nominated for two Green Room Awards and two AFI Awards.

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ZAHRA NEWMAN Performer

ARTIST BIO

A 2008 graduate from the Victorian College of the Arts, Zahra’s theatre credits include: The Mountaintop, The Cherry Orchard, Clybourne Park, Richard III, The Drowsy Chaperone and Rockabye (Melbourne Theatre Company); Menagerie (Daniel Schlusser Ensemble/Melbourne Theatre Company); An Officer and A Gentleman – The Musical (GFO); Random (Melbourne Theatre Company/Sydney Opera House/Brisbane Powerhouse); Private Lives (Belvoir); Woyzeck (Malthouse Theatre/ArtsRadar/Belvoir); Elektra (Fraught Outfit); and The Crucible (USQ Performance Centre). Zahra has also been involved in various developments and workshops for theatre including The Beast (Melbourne Theatre Company); Antigone (Hayloft Project); LockUp (Holding Zone/Arts Victoria); Back at the Dojo (Stuck Pigs Squealing); Blood Wedding (Malthouse Theatre); War Crimes (RealTV); and After All This (Elbow Room/ Carriageworks).

Zahra has done voiceover work for Melbourne Theatre Company and can be heard on ABC Radio National’s Poetica program. Film and television credits include Bound By Blue and Rush. At VCA she was awarded the Richard Pratt Bursary for an Outstanding Actor, and at the University of Southern Queensland she was awarded the Alan Edwards Scholarship for excellence in her first year. Zahra received the 2011 Green Room Award for Best Female Actor for Random.

‘What is stronger in us — passion or habit?

Or are all the violent impulses, all the whirl of our desires and turbulent passions, only the consequence of our ardent age, and is it only through youth that they seem deep and shattering?’

– NIKOLAI GOGOL 23

ERYN-JEAN NORVILL Performer

ARTIST BIO

Eryn-Jean’s theatre credits include: Romeo and Juliet (Sydney Theatre Company); Top Girls (Melbourne Theatre Company); Hamlet (Griffin Theatre Company); The Boys (Penrith Performing and Visual Arts); Truck Stop (Little Ones Theatre and Tamarama Rock Surfers); Picture of Bright Lights (Elbow Room Productions); A Tiny Chorus (Red Stitch); Lobby Hero (Bell Shakespeare); and A Man For All Seasons (Complete Works Theatre Company). Her film and television credits include Felony, Test Drive, Tethered, In the City, Blood Ballad, Gods Algorithm, Spacious Apartment, Crockery, Death Star PR and Home & Away. ErynJean received the 2012 Green Room Award for Best Female Actor for Top Girls; the 2012 Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Mainstage Production for The Boys. ErynJean graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2006. In 2013 she graduated from Ecole Phillipe Gaulier in France.

GREG STONE Performer

ARTIST BIO

Greg is a graduate of NIDA. Previously for Malthouse Theatre he has appeared in Pompeii L.A., A Golem Story, Eldorado, Julia 3, Myth Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America, Rapture, A Return to the Brink, Miracles, Good Works. His other theatre credits include: Hamlet, Babyteeth and Stuff Happens (Belvoir); The Crucible, Queen Lear, Clybourne Park, Life Without Me, Poor Boy, Blackbird, Love Song, Assassins, The Pillowman, Cloud Nine, The Seagull, A Little Night Music, Angels in America (Melbourne Theatre Company); The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Stones in His Pockets, Summer Rain, Merrily We Roll Along (Sydney Theatre Company); Don’s Party (State Theatre Company of South Australia); War of the Roses (Bell Shakespeare); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Life x 3 (Black Swan State Theatre Company); All the Black Dogs, McNeil (Griffin Theatre Company); and The Berry Man (Hothouse Theatre). Greg’s film credits include Is This The Real World, Sunset Six, Swerve, Oranges and Sunshine, Van Diemen’s Land and The Bank; and for TV Devil’s Dust, Winners & Losers, Underbelly, City Homicide, The Librarians, Blue Heelers, Stingers, Marshall Law, Halifax, Seachange and Neighbours. In 2006 Greg received a Helpmann Award and a Green Room Award for Stuff Happens.

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PROVOCATIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE The play ends with a scene of the actors huddling around a smartphone to read reviews. Here’s some of the conversation that was happening on social media hours after the first preview.

AUDIENCE MEMBER A

‘I have a million gazillion thoughts on The Government Inspector. Such as, the hyperrealism of the actors being themselves but in a contrived and fictitious environment, we glimpse the parallel with Gogol’s story in the character of Frank as Seyfat, and his postdramatic wanky production of TGI (which provides really self-conscious use of Brecht, the absurd etc), then the musical theatre elements piled with satire. Not to mention the function and effect of the revolve on the

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structure of the work and the actor/audience relationship!’

The score evokes Russian folk music for me, rather melancholy. Other parts I felt I was listening to Klezmer. These I felt were nods to the original context. It’s a huge metatheatre thing really. I also thought it was interesting that it was colour blind casting for The Philadelphia Story, but felt it got lost when Zahra played Dolores.

AUDIENCE MEMBER B

I always understood the postmodern sense of pastiche to be a negative term though, a failure to say anything; I used the term myself to describe the play, but I meant it as a criticism. Do you think that the play we saw was critical enough to make any actual comment about Gogol’s play or Australian realism or camp cheap musical theatre? I would have said that, while it was clear that it was trying to be parody, it was too close to what it was making fun of, it became what it was trying to parody, and so the message fails. What made you think that the irony was successful?

AUDIENCE MEMBER c

I think, with postmodernism, it’s easy to dismiss the term pastiche as a negative connotation, but the term has its own merits too. Pastiche does not equate to a piece of art that is of inferior quality, or that it makes a bad effort in giving homage e.g. Neo noir films like Blade Runner and Drive are seen as a pastiche of 1940s film noir, and they’re both fantastic. I think yes, the play makes a conscious effort to be critical, but perhaps its overall playful tone and light banter makes it difficult to actually point out which commentary is to be taken seriously. From what you said, do you mean that the play has become a parody of itself? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s a really interesting point!

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