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THE SHIFTING POINT OF FEAR AND TREMBLING
musical chords.”*° It was Meyerhold who had abandoned naturalism and
“developed scenery from the perspective of the characters first, staging their
pipe dream”./%1 His 1926 The Government Inspector gave enormous visual
inspiration to Tovstonogov’s mise-en-scéne as well, similarly to Gogol’s own
sketch for the last scene. Inviting the Mayor to the real government inspector,
“the tall, straight gendarme with a shako”’® seemed to have jumped from this
sketch into the production. However, the half-cut landau “fantastically full of
various people squeezing together”,’** the “flower-basket-like pyramid of men
and women” reading Khlestakov’s letter,’* the reduction of Khlestakov’s room
to a few square meters were all showing Meyerhold’s influence. The room,
which arrived on wheels into the basic set, had only its back wall with a
semicircular window and a door on the right, but no wall surrounding it.
The door became part of an acoustic game by its opening and closing, as the
noise of the restaurant intensified and faded in the room, so that the sounds
of creating an atmosphere could include a merely signaled place into an
environment aiming at illusion. Stylistic diversity was enhanced not only by
costumes, make-up and coiffure adjusted to the exaggerated characters — e.g.
the Postmaster’s gigantic bowtie, the Magistrate’s spiky hair and overdrawn
features, the frills of lavish clothes on the Mayor’s wife and daughter — but
also by dissonant and thunderous musical effects, distancing us relentlessly
from the world of comedy.
IMPACT AND POSTERITY
Stating that “such a smart and highly elaborated production had not been
seen on Hungarian stages for long”,”> reviews praised Tovstonogov’s mise¬
en-scéne without exception. However, the significance of the production
was revealed in its aftermath as it started a dialogue between Government
Inspectors in Hungary.’”*° Some critics found Péter Gothar’s 1982 mise-en¬
scéne in Kaposvár reminiscent in its approach to Gogol to the production
of the National almost a decade before,” and Gothar’s emphases were
legendarily underlined in the 1987 production of the Katona J6zsef Theatre in
Budapest. This Government Inspector by Gábor Zsámbéki - read as a proof
of contemporary Hungarian life in its guest performances all around the
730 Koltai: Tovsztonogov és A revizor, 11.
Major: Tanultam, 7.
Szigethy: Gogol: A revizor. Kritika, 21.
Létay: A polgármester, 13.
734 Molnar Gal: A polgármester: Kállai Ferenc, 42.
735 István Torda: A revizor, Orszag-Vilag, Vol. 17, No. 12, 21“ March, 1973, 13.
736 Cf. István Sándor L.: A legenda átörökítői. Beszélgetés Máté Gäborral, Ellenfeny 7:3 (2002), 28.
737 Cf. Tamás Mészáros: , A levegő vidékies". A revizor Kaposvárott, Színház 16:3 (1983), 11-15.
731
732
733
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