It’s 28 years since Stephen Daldry’s staging of An Inspector
Calls, now considered to be a landmark production, first stunned audiences at
the National’s Lyttleton Theatre. His directorial decisions, far from being
gimmicks, did so much to shine a light into the dark corners of J. B. Priestley’s
dusty text that it still feels fresh and vibrant today.
Daldry succeeds in setting the play both in its original 1912
period and in 1945, the year it was completed, with the use of a framing device
that watches one era through the eyes of another. The surreal aspects of Ian
MacNeil’s complex set, along with the use of a stage curtain, enhance the sense
of theatrical unreality and enable us to add our own time as yet another layer
of history to see it through.
Suspended precariously above a desolate, post-blitz
landscape, the Birling family’s home floats like something out of the
imagination. A group of children gaze back into the past through the smoke of wartime devastation, to see the aloof, unwitting gentility of another
generation.
We first encounter the Birlings’ opening party scene from
outside the house, before it eventually spills them out into the wilderness of
the stage as they each find their individual stories revealed by the mysterious
Inspector Goole. With Alice in Wonderland juxtapositions of scale, nothing is
what it seems in this increasingly timeless story.
Liam Brennan reprises his earlier award winning performance as Inspector
Goole in this current tour, and he pitches his characterisation with just the
right amount of strangeness and menace. By the time he has finished with them,
none of the family who began in celebration can escape the suggestion of their
part in the destruction of a young life. The cleverness of the staging, whilst
certainly immensely theatrical and engaging, is that it serves to separate
everything in the play even further from any sort of reality than the text
alone can achieve.
The rest of the ensemble cast all give pin-sharp
performances, with Daldry’s take on their characters forcing us to reflect on
Priestley’s critical motivation in the writing. The clear case that the author
was making for a more just society feels as pertinent today as it did
both in his post-war era and at the time when this production first appeared.
It’s as loud a reminder as we might have that the past does indeed repeat
itself.
Running at 105 minutes without an interval the play needs to
maintain tension for extended periods, and it does so with extraordinary focus
and style. From the opening, dissonant chords of music from the radio to the
accusatory glare of the supernumerary cast, it’s both a chilling message and
hugely entertaining theatre.
Star Rating: Four Stars
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| An Inspector Calls - Photographs (c) Tristram Kenton |
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