Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young review, Sadler’s Wells: Revisor is marvellously danced and superbly staged

Written in 1836, this danced comedy is the story of corrupt provincial officials

Dancer Tiffany Tregarthen in the remake of the satirical play (Michael Slobodian)

★★★★★

Corruption, lies and haunting beauty: Revisor is a danced comedy with a strange, lyrical heart. Choreographer Crystal Pite and playwright Jonathon Young reinvent Nikolai Gogol’s play about mistaken identity in dazzling layers of sound and vision.

Pite and Young’s first major collaboration was Betroffenheit, a shattering depiction of grief and addiction, shot through with dark comedy. This time, they start with farce and push it into unnerving places. Written in 1836, Revizor (usually translated as The Government Inspector or The Inspector General) is the story of corrupt provincial officials. Mistaking a civil servant for an undercover inspector, they fall over themselves to bribe him and accuse each other.

It’s danced to a soundtrack of Young’s new text, which is then reinterpreted in movement. At its broadest and funniest, it’s a kind of whole-body lipsyncing for an outrageous cast of characters. Pite’s dancers are shapeshifters, as flexible and unpredictable as cartoons. They’ll start with a naturalistic pose, then erupt into movement that expresses the panics or hesitations of speech.

The Postmaster stumbles over his words, secrets bubbling up and only just repressed. Dancer Jermaine Spivey swoops and seems almost to swell, body undulating with the words, then snapping impossibly upright. The ordinary rules of volume and momentum no longer seem to apply: Pite takes her dancers from full flight to a frozen stop, and back again.

Young’s new text picks up on the Russian title to make the civil servant a “revisor”, someone who corrects official documents, changing meaning by moving a comma. We hear of the officials’ crimes only through omissions and denials. The whole story is obsessively retold, as if looking for the gaps, the crack that might still let honesty in.

As Gogol’s tale hurtles onwards, Pite and Young start to take it apart. Jay Gower Taylor’s naturalistic set melts away to leave a stage full of reflected light, gorgeously lit by Tom Visser. The dancers repeat the same physical groupings, but this time we hear a description of movement – “turn head to the left, tension”. Even in the abstract, without character costumes or cues, need and panic leak from these bodies.

What’s real, who’s fake? Even the narrator isn’t sure of herself, while the number of performers is slippery. Gregory Lau’s voiceless Misha emerges like a ghost, simply appearing in the middle of a crowd that shouldn’t have space for him. Marvellously danced and superbly staged, Revisor creates a world that is dreamlike and all too familiar.