A quick thumbs-up for the latest touring show from Northern Broadsides - a nifty Northern reworking, complete with brass-band accompaniment, of Gogol's A Government Inspector by Deborah McAndrew. Toffee-nosed civil servant (Jon Trenchard, winningly camp) plunges into the realm of corrupt local officialdom, to increasingly tangled - if ever more laboured - effect. "He spends the whole time in the pub and pays for everything on expenses - he must be from the Government," runs one typically whip-sharp line. A hoot.
- Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph
carried through with such intelligence, verve, imagination and consistency - not to mention clockwork precision! . . . The play is thoroughly Yorkshirised, but stays close to the original in the sequence of main speeches and events - even the naming of characters, though most of us would accept Tony Belcher and Luke Pickles as proper Yorkshire names.
- Ron Simpson, Whatsonstage.com
Deborah McAndrew's tight script weaves in some fantastic current references from the government's alleged love of pasties to means-testing but the piece has a timeless quality to it - it could've been set any time over the last 40 years and would have been as relevant.
- Steve Stubbs, Backstagepass.biz
Nikolai Gogol’s biting satire on the corruption in Tsarist Russian public life makes an effortless translation to a small modern day Pennine hill town … this campy, brassy update is very funny and very relevant … a touch of Yorkshire Noir
- Jonathan Brown, Independent