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An Inspector Calls

Published Wednesday 4 February 2009 at 13:25 by Richard Edmonds

It has been said recently that character acting is one of the things the British do supremely well, if there are any doubts on that score, you only have to witness the fine performances Stephen Daldry has drawn from a dedicated cast in this stunning revival of Priestley’s masterwork.

An Inspector Calls was once the tired old warhorse circulating through British repertory theatre in the fifties, but Daldry has re-set this jewel of a play in a non-realistic, expressionistic time-warp, paying due reverence to Jack Priestley’s assertion: “Only a fool would think that I was a realistic dramatist.”

Priestley would have cheered this sombre treatment of his play, where the nightmarish inquisition of the wealthy Birling family by Inspector Goole (who speaks in the tones of an Angel of Doom - Louis Hilyer in the role, whose tones of doom could deepen a little) and their unwitting involvement in the death of a working-class girl denied compassion and a simple pay rise, takes place on an eternity of wet, gas-lit cobbled streets, chilly under falling rain and an ominous sky, surrounding a middle-class, Edwardian doll’s house, which eventually collapses, symbolising the family’s corrupt morals (marvellous designs by Ian MacNeill).

Extraordinary moments remain in the memory, as this human dilemma closes. At one point a small boy attempts, in a filmic way, to heave up the curtains to get inside the play, elsewhere Mrs Birling’s arrogance is reduced to rain-soaked pulp, while a crowd of silent, underprivileged townspeople watch impassively. We are all culpable, Priestley is saying within Goole’s final soliloquy. Sadly, teenage elements in a crowded house roared with laughter at many sensitive moments.

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