The chaotic and farcical events of
The UN Inspector would never have spiralled to their tragic conclusion had it not been for the fact that almost all of the central actors in this drama are corrupt. Corruption, whether of individuals, organisations or governments is, and always has been, part of the drama of everyday life. Discussion about combating poverty in Africa continually refers to the problems of giving financial aid, which is designed to alleviate the suffering of ordinary people, to governments and officials many of whom are corrupt. As the reports of
Global Witness have revealed, it is not only in places like the Congo or Angola where there have been instances of spectacular misappropriation of wealth (whether it be in the form of oil or diamonds) belonging to the people of those countries, but also in the former Soviet empire. In places like Kazakhstan, government corruption has resulted in economic stagnation and ruthless suppression of individual liberty. Even in the United States, the most economically prosperous country in the world, the case of the Enron Corporation revealed an extraordinary and massive web of individual and corporate corruption fuelled by ambition and greed.
In
The UN Inspector , and in Gogol’s original play
The Government Inspector on which it is based, the ministers of David Farr’s
fictional state are vulnerable to believing that the actual non-entity in their midst (Khlestakov/Gammon) is a powerful inspector with the power to change their lives for the worse. Because their collective guilt makes them paranoid, they assume that everyone, including the so-called Inspector, is as open to corruption and bribery as they are. Despite the apparent change from an autocracy to a democracy,
the President and his ministers remain deeply corrupt. The Inspector himself appears to confirm this because he is all too ready to accept the bribes he is offered. But what makes the play really interesting as a study of human vulnerability is that this man’s greatest incentive to collude with the corrupt is not power or even material gain. Michael Sheen revealed in his performance as the failed estate agent that
Martin Gammon finds himself, for the first time in his life, looked up to, admired, and flattered. It is his transformation from being nobody into somebody that works like a powerful aphrodisiac. Individuals, companies and organisations, even governments are susceptible, Gogol and Farr remind us, not only to the promise of material gain, but also and possibly more deeply, to being seduced by flattery.