Introduction: Simon Stone and Company

Less than 2 years after a bruising rights battle over Death of a Salesman, a Simon Stone production again made headlines. The Philadelphia Story, announced as a 2014 co-production between Sydney’s Belvoir and Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, had to be withdrawn after the musical rights could not be secured. It was replaced in both seasons by a new Stone-directed production: a version of The Government Inspector, billed as by Simon Stone after Nikolai Gogol. As Jason Blake deadpanned in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, ‘having died in 1852, Gogol presents no obstacles to Stone’s penmanship’. The show opened with a company of actors receiving news their production had been cancelled, following which their off-stage director (named Simon Stone) quit the project. The central misidentification at the heart of Gogol’s play was here replaced by a meta-theatrical wink: a bad actor arriving for an improv audition was mistaken for the famous avant-garde director the company of actors have contacted to replace Stone. The actor, as it turned out, was a bumbling fool: but the company accommodated his idiocy, reminding themselves that the director was a big deal in Europe. As in Gogol’s original, the show ended with the actual director arriving in a blaze of lights and theatrical haze. Dazzled by the reveal, the audience may have wondered for a moment: could that have been the real Stone himself, newly anointed a European success, arriving onstage?