Government Inspector

David Harrower's plays include Knives in Hens, Kill the Old, Torture Their Young, Dark Earth (Traverse Theatre), Presence (Royal Court) The Chrysalids (NT Connections), Blackbird (Edinburgh International Festival; West End), A Slow Air (Tron Theatre, Glasgow), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, adapted from the novel by Muriel Spark, (Donmar). Adaptations include Büchner's Woyzeck (Edinburgh Lyceum), Chekhov's Ivanov and Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods (National Theatre), Schiller's Mary Stuart (National Theatre of Scotland), and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Brecht's The Good Soul of Szechuan and Gogol's The Government Inspector (Young Vic). Film credits: Una; Outlaw King. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-52), the greatest Russian novelist and playwright of the early 19th century, wrote the first realist Russian plays. He is celebrated for his novel Dead Souls (1842) and his short stories 'The Overcoat' and 'Diary of a Madman'. His satirical masterpiece Government Inspector (1836; first seen in London in 1920) was so severely attacked that he went into exile in Rome, only returning in 1848. Other plays include Marriage and Gamblers. In later life he became a religious fanatic and starved to death soon after burning the second and third parts of Dead Souls.