After the National's Gogolian update, Chichester goes back to the source. But while this production by Martin Duncan and translation by Alistair Beaton faithfully capture Gogol's strange mix of realism and grotesquerie, I found myself wishing that the spiralling dementia Michael Sheen brings to the central role on the South Bank could have been transported to West Sussex.
Alistair McGowan here plays Khlestakov, the minor pen-pusher mistaken by gullible provincials for a St Petersburg bigwig. But while McGowan is a dazzling TV impressionist, he fails to build a convincing character. He looks like an attenuated dandy and has good moments, such as when he stretches out his long legs and vaingloriously announces: "I'm also known for my balls." But there is no sense of an impoverished jerk carried away by his own power-crazed fantasies. Significantly, McGowan makes nothing of the key line, "All one needs is respect and love." Where Sheen at that point gives us a glimpse of the hero's shrunken solitude, McGowan simply continues his impersonation of a city slicker adrift in the sticks.
However, Duncan's production succeeds in capturing the play's nightmarish theatricality. The show begins with an ominous flash of lightning; it is filled with echoing sound effects from Adam Cork, and is set by Jon Morrell on what might be a footlit Russian provincial stage.
Some of the performances have the right touch of Gogolian absurdity. Best of all is Steven Beard, who turns the education director into a figure of such hilariously dithering corruption that, when offered a cigar, his hand advances and retreats in an orgy of indecision.
All the duped provincials are sharply individualised. Stephen Ventura makes something oddly touching out of Dobchinsky's desire that his son, actually fathered by the lecherous magistrate, be legally branded his own. Graham Turner brings out the mayor's rancid cruelty to the local shopkeepers. And Selina Cadell as the mayor's hoity-toity wife and Sophie-Louise Dann as his sex-hungry daughter have the right singularity.
Duncan's production creates a plausibly isolated Russian community, and accurately reproduces Gogol's extravagant climax in which the characters are frozen in a permanent tableau of terror. But I yearned for a more complex Khlestakov who would find that a case of mistaken identity revealed his own infantile dreams of omnipotence.
· Until September 10. Box office: 01243 781312.
