Not so Farr-fetched

The timing couldn't have been better. As David Farr's The UN Inspector - a free adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector - hits the stage, events in Ukraine and Uzbekistan still resonate in the news and Russian oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky languishes in jail for fraud and tax evasion.

Gogol's classic satire of greed and corruption (completed in 1835) has arguably never been so ripe for revisiting. And Farr has risen to the challenge with his usual gusto.

The 35-year-old playwright and director, fresh from a successful stint as artistic director at Bristol Old Vic, is about to take over the reins at the Lyric Hammersmith, but still has energy to spare for this in-between project for the National Theatre. He talks blisteringly quickly and fizzes animatedly about the process of writing and directing this piece.

'I'm not trying to say The Government Inspector needed to be updated. That's simply not true,' says Farr. 'But it's amazing that this play totally works in a contemporary setting. It's quite tragic that it works, in fact.'

So in The UN Inspector we find singularly useless English property developer Martin Gammon (played by Michael Sheen) mistaken for the powerful titular inspector by the craven bigwigs of an ex-Soviet state, who are terrified their systematic stripping of the country's assets and free use of torture and repression are about to be exposed.

Add in a president's wife who fancies herself as the next Ivana Trump, and a rapacious daughter who is the ultimate Paris Hilton wannabe, and the farce that unravels before us is much more brutal than Gogol conceived, and painfully funny, thanks to Farr's ear for dialogue.

This is not the first time Farr has tackled a classic text and aggressively reconfigured it to draw out contemporary resonances. His acclaimed Crime And Punishment In Dalston transferred Dostoevsky's masterful work to East London; his stage version of The Odyssey started with a modern-day Odysseus being carted off to Margate Detention Centre as an illegal immigrant.

'There is something about taking a story that has some kind of archetypal existence and then suddenly planting that in a provocative way into somewhere you wouldn't normally expect it,' he explains. 'There's a tension between the expectation of the piece and what then happens, and I find the audience gets very excited by that. It provokes dialogue between the audience and the play, which is what theatre is about, really.'

Farr admits that the change in the political climate since 9/11 has been a decisive factor in his desire to look back at the 'big stories' to try to get a handle on current events.

'Theatre is very good at interrogating big, complicated moral issues,' he says. 'In the late 1990s, if you wanted to do that you tended to be more elliptical about how you did it. You'd take classic plays but you wouldn't necessarily try to make them contemporary: the bigger political picture wasn't really there. Suddenly that all changed and these stories seemed to gain new life and new significance.'