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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 miseen-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-enscéne 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 s 148 +
