The government inspector

Widely held to have led the realist revolution in Russian drama, Gogol liberated comedy from a tradition of didacticism and sentimentalisty. "The Government Inspector", Gogol's masterpiece, was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as the greatest play in the Russian language.

This is the poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell's version of Gogol's classical satire on human vanity with its story of a penniless nobody from Moscow who is mistaken for a government inspector by the corrupt and self-seeking officials of a small town in Tsarist Russia.