01 December 2016 (released)
06 December 2016
Steven Daldry’s ingenious revival of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls returns to the West End to coincide with the re-introduction of the text for English GCSE. This is of course brilliant for filling The Playhouse seats but less good if you’re heading out to the West End for a bit of a grown-up treat. It might have been a one off but there was a hint of school assembly as I clung guitily onto my glass of wine in the middle of a sea of well behaved teenagers.
The curtain rises on a bleak, rain-soaked street, with hungry children splashing in the gutter. Raised on stilts is a giant dolls-house where we can half hear and see an Edwardian dinner party, the guests comicly squashed into the miniature dining room and occasionally ducking to get out onto the wobbly balcony. I’m not sure the balcony was supposed to wobble but given that the whole house literally collapses at the end – it’s an appropriately symbolic wobble and a magical set designed by Ian MacNeil.
The brooding Scottish Inspector (Liam Brennan) arrives as the Birling’s are celebrating Sheila’s engagement, played with warmth and humour by Carmela Corbett. He tells them that a young woman has killed herself with a bottle of bleach and then sets out to prove that every single person at dinner is in part responsible for her death.
Priestley wrote his Edwardian thriller with a socialist purpose just after the Second World War, at a time when the welfare state was being dreamed up. Daldry’s production integrates that period of history, with destitute figures who slowly fill the dimly lit streets into which the dining room literally spills. His production was a huge success when it first opened in the National in 1992 and has since returned four times to the West End as well as major National and International Tours.
What is most astonishing is that the call for social responsibility in this heavily ideological and deliciously theatrical re-imagining remains entirely relevant. If it related to Margaret Thatcher in 1992, it’s no less pertinent today in the light of Tory government cuts. Plenty of material for an A* GCSE student.
