SATIRICAL comedy was in the spotlight as Queen Katherine School Year 13 students staged Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector as part of their theatre studies programme.

Gogol's 19th Century play tells the story of a penniless nobody from Moscow who is mistaken for a government inspector by the corrupt and self-seeking officials of a small town in Tsarist Russia.

The Kendal school's drama teacher Caroline Barber tells me the young actors were heavily influenced by KAOS Theatre Company's performance of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Brewery Arts Centre last year: "The students have experimented with physical theatre techniques and incorporated them into their performance.

"They performed really well. The physical theatre angle helped to emphasise the subtlety of the dialogue. It certainly grabbed the audience's attention".