![Absurd, modernist, surreal: Dough Letheren in Revisor at Sadler's Wlls](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/dance/2020/03/04/TELEMMGLPICT000226763018_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQfyf2A9a6I9YchsjMeADBa08.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Revisor, Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young, Sadler’s Wells, review: a nightmarish, beautiful, mind-blowing journey
![Absurd, modernist, surreal: Dough Letheren in Revisor at Sadler's Wlls](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/dance/2020/03/04/TELEMMGLPICT000226763018_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQfyf2A9a6I9YchsjMeADBa08.jpeg?imwidth=680)
In 2015, the Canadian duo of contemporary choreographer Crystal Pite and dramatist Jonathon Young, together with Pite’s company Kidd Pivot, unleashed their new show Betroffenheit. A borderline-genius study of bereavement, inspired by a horrific personal tragedy – Young’s losing his daughter and her two cousins in a fire – it was one of those once-in-a-blue-moon shows that felt genuinely unimprovable.
In the wake of that, and with Pite continuing to deliver one first-class work after another in the interim, hopes were almost cruelly high for their new collaboration, Revisor. But the duo has not disappointed one bit.
First seen in Vancouver last year, and this week getting its UK premiere, Revisor is based on Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 anti-corruption farce The Government Inspector (Russian title: Revizor). The thumbnail plot is that the craven officials of a small Russian town hear that an inspector is coming, incognito, to check up on them; but they mistake another, entirely different visitor for the inspector, and he ends up playing on their mistake and exposing their corruption anyway. (Fawlty Towers admirers may recognise its influence in the episode The Hotel Inspectors.)
What’s on offer here, however, is not only a brilliantly conceived, ever-relevant broadside on governmental venality, but also a mind-blowing cerebral journey that’s as evocative of the absurdism of Ionesco, modernism of Brecht and surrealism of Lynch as it is of any choreographic influences.
It begins with the creator’s voice-over (by Meg Roe) establishing where to put her “figures”, with one puppet-master performer placing and positioning two of the lead characters on the naturalistically designed stage. Then, building on a trope from Betroffenheit, the action proper starts, with the clutch of suddenly-panicking officials both lip-syncing meticulously to pre-recorded lines and also fleshing out the dialogue in the exaggerated, extravagantly gestural, unnaturally fluid movement of cartoon characters.
![This is dance theatre at its most vivid and mysterious: David Raymond in Revisor at Sadler's Wells](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/dance/2020/03/04/TELEMMGLPICT000226763017_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqx1rGucoo2J_ExhuM2sOt-5Dg7ACGJPdPR4xgCzbOV8A.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In animated films, the voices are nearly always recorded first, with the hyperkinetic “action” later created around them, and that it essentially what Pite and Young have done here. The result is not just implicitly scathing but also very funny indeed, and (not for the first time) you marvel at the superhuman speed, control and agility of the Kidd Pivot dancers, Jermaine Spivey above all.
Perhaps 25 minutes in, however, something happens that you do not see coming. Ella Rothschild’s (excellent) Minister DeSouza is holding forth, but – like a CD with a fleck of dirt on it – she suddenly gets stuck on one syllable. Endlessly repeated, this melts into the unheimlich electronic sound design, and the sets fade away, soon to be replaced with a huge, eye-boggling (eye-Gogoling, even?) projection that makes you feel as though you’re in someone’s brain watching synapses fire.
Full of dance passages both beautifully ordered and disordered, this long central section proceeds – mesmerisingly, trippily – to pull the play apart into what feels like constituent verbal and visual atoms. Does it, as Pite and Young hope, shed new, profounder light on the original work? To return briefly to Fawlty Towers, the great film writer David Thompson once described Fawlty himself as “the tragedy of fascism … the iron jaw of law and order that knows it will begin to speak in gibberish”, and there pehaps is some of that here: corrupt pocket Hitlers reduced to the gibbering goons they in fact are.
![Superhuman control: Rena Narumi and Jermaine Spivey in Revisor at Sadler's Wells](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/dance/2020/03/04/TELEMMGLPICT000226763033_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQfyf2A9a6I9YchsjMeADBa08.jpeg?imwidth=350)
But this blisteringly original deconstruction of Gogol’s farce strikes me, above all, as a choreographer’s long dark night of the soul about creating a blisteringly original deconstruction of Gogol’s farce, with the creative process laid neurotically bare as the the dancers’ parts are constantly “revised” (hence that one-letter change in the title).
En route, there are also some particularly startling dream-logic vignettes. In an echo of one passage in the opening sections, a man with antlers for hands calmly saunters across the stage (very Derevo, that); in another similar echo, the so-called Revisor (a moustachioed Tiffany Tregarthen) and his assistant, Osip (David Raymond), in their room, suddenly repeat flickering patterns of movement as if on misfiring 16mm film.
And so, while Revisor’s hope for “justice at the gate” rings out loud and clear, it otherwise invites endless interpretations – which, of course, is part of the fun. This is dance theatre at its most vivid and mysterious, most beautiful and nightmarish. It is on for two more nights, and tickets are still available. Just go.
Until March 5. Tickets: 0844 871 2118; tickets.telegraph.co.uk