Government Inspector ****

Government Inspector is a play which demands outsize performances and David Harrower’s lively colloquial version of Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 comic satire certainly delivers in Richard Jones’ often surreal production.

The audience enters Gogol’s world of corrupt bureaucrats via a snaking corridor, passing a card game and a potato-peeling serf along the way.

Once through the door, designer Miriam Buether gives us the acid-toned abode of the troubled Mayor of a provincial backwater. Rumour has it that a government inspector, travelling incognito, is on his way, and the burghers who’ve been lining their own pockets – the judge, the school superintendent, the head of hospitals, and the postmaster (a cross-dressed Amanda Lawrence with a toothbrush moustache and the inability to deliver any letter unopened) – are, to put it mildly, worried.

What follows is a farcical spiral of mistaken identity when they wrongly assume that Khlestakov (an impecunious clerk who’s gambled away all his money and can’t even settle his bill at the local inn) is the feared official.

Plied with bribes, fought over by both the Mayor’s wife (Doon Mackichan in a jewelled turquoise lampshade of a dress) and their nubile daughter, he’s treated like royalty - and Kyle Soller’s manic Khlestakov, with his shock of red hair, laps it all up with increasing glee.

There’s nothing subtle about this manic production. The pace rarely slackens, rats appear in the doorway, and Julian Barratt (of TV’s The Mighty Boosh) is both panicked and sinister as the Mayor at the heart of the corruption.

Young Vic, The Cut, SE1 8LZ Tube Southwark / Waterloo (0207 922 2922) youngvic.org Until 9th July (£10.00 - £29.50)