GOVERNOR. I have called you together, gentlemen, to
tell you an unpleasant piece of news. An Inspector-General
is coming.

Thursday we went to see The Inspector-General (Der Revisor) by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol at the 25. Zürcher Theater Spektakel. It was performed by the Lithuanian theater company of award-winning director Alvis Hermanis. It was very Soviet, and intentionally, even provokingly, extremely old-fashioned, direct and straightforward. In an interview Hermanis made his case and explained that after all those "postmodernist" disturbance and perversions, on-stage brutality, nudity et cetera, the only way to be avant-garde these days was to make theater as it used to be, simple and uncooked: extremely normal theater. Actually this was an amazing experience, I -and I guess most of the public- kept feeling strangely alienated by this classic Russian comedy, which is so inherently Russian that the director said he was fairly surprised how an audience of foreigners with a cultural background so different could actually like it as much as it did. He found a nice picture for this situation saying it must "feel like sex with two condoms". And as the entire play was spoken in Lithuanian, the German-speaking audience wore wireless earplugs and listening to both the actors' text and a simultaneous translation, he even called it "telephone sex with two condoms". :)
You can listen to parts of that interview (mostly in German) at DRS2.
If you want to see this amazing inspector-general: They play it a third and last time this Saturday evening.