Allo, Allo, Allo
An Inspector Calls
by J.B. Priestley
Royal National Theatre of Great Britain
Her Majesty’s
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
For some time now there have been intimations that an Inspector would be calling. Those who first saw the Royal National Theatre’s 1992 London revival of the J.B Priestley country house detective mystery reported back to the colonies that this fusty old chestnut had been given a startling new shine. The expressionist treatment, the assured direction from Stephen Daldry and the inventive design by Ian McNeil featured prominently in despatches. A s did the sense of freshness and surprise that a work so contemptuously familiar could be so transcendently resurrected.
wheels turn, what began as an unexpected, even impulsive, production is transformed into a blue chip property. The Inspector gets franchised – for the West End, for Broadway, and an Asia Pacific tour. The little engine that could has turned into a juggernaut. So it is hardly surprising that by the time he gets to the door the Inspector has inflated into Baron Munchausen.
J.B. Priestley’s play is an engaging piece – a cross betwen Cluedo and Bernard Shaw – with a stern didacticism which is refreshing amidst the downsizing euphemisms of the current equity debate. An Inspector Calls first played in Moscow but its class preoccupations and pleas for social responsibilty are modest enough. It is only an indication of our present indifference to the human cost of prosperity if the play seems at all bolshie or bold. All the same, when the phantom-like Inspector Goole visits the house of one of T.S.Eliot’s Bradford millionaires with news of a young woman’s suicide, he cuts a swathe through a whole family’s complacency and we enjoy the exhilaration of his levelling indignation.
Director Stephen Daldry has shrewdly recognised that the secret of this play is in the framing. Priestley has encased his narrative in a kind of deja vue but Daldry takes this further. Three small boys with ringworm haircuts and fairisle vests investigate the velvet curtain at Her Majesty’s. They turn on a radio, they enter the proscenium as if anyone has a right to be there and then, when the curtain opens on to Ian McNeil’s spacious set, we see the privilege which is being chivvied against. On the OP side is a battered red phone booth, also, a lamp post for inspectors of police to stand trenchantly near. An old woman in shabby clothes fossicks about with a bucket and broom and, through a curtain of rain, a crowd assembles. The scene is an English city in wartime, drab, fog shrouded. But at the centre of the stage, erupting out of the paving, raised up as if on stilts, is a scale version of a Great House. It is closed tight but the windows spray strong light in all directions and we hear the confident hilarity of a social gathering.
It is this image which dominates the play. The house is like a glittering Faberge egg, intricate in detail, enclosed in its secrets. Gradually, various hinges operate and the Birling family steps out on to balconies to enjoy their cigars and their breathless banter while the faceless crowd stands in silent witness. If Daldry gets a little heavy-handed it is only because the country house play, mainstay of English bourgeois theatre, is still a potent and unexamined declaration of privilege- revisited, like Brideshead, in a succession of television costume dramas and in recent cinema whimsies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral.
These structural meanings are powerfully stated and this is what is meant when this production of An Inspector Calls is described as expressionist. Unfortunately, though, the innovations of the mise-en-scene are undermined by the performances. As the Inspector, Barry Foster strikes attitudes with sweeps of the arm, gyrations of the neck and a vocabulary of grimaces which tell us that this is anti-naturalistic acting but very little else. When he needs to be still- like Alastair Sim’s memorable Inspector in the 1954 film version- Foster gives a hyperactively mannered version of the Singing Detective. When we need a bit of menacing hush the Inspector is all strident outrage.
As the senior Birlings, Edward Peel and Helen Lindsay seem to vie with each other to see who can make the most noise. These performances bear an uncanny resemblance to a style known as Bad Rep. The Birlings are terrible people precisely because they think that they are quite reasonable people- so playing them like Punch and Judy, or Lady Bracknell and a panto version of Citizen Kane, rather defeats the purpose. Louis Hilyer makes a better fist of Gerald Croft, the fiance with some explaining to do, as does Guy Parry as Eric Birling, the feckless son of a bullying father. Matilda Ziegler is excellent as Sheila Birling. Her performance is lucid and well-judged, trusting the ironies of the text and finding energy in them. It is not merely that hers is a more sympathetic part but that she has, unlike some of her colleagues, managed to locate her performance within the decor and the director’s vision.
This is a memorable production of an honourable play. We cannot be unimpressed by the inventive set, especially the spectacular disintegration of the house and it sinister reconstruction. Rick Fisher’s lighting, the costume and sound are all skilfully managed .But decor doesn’t maketh the play -and the uneven, lack-lustre, hectoring performances cannot go unremarked. On the other hand, if this production proves influential it is to be hoped that Stephen Daldry’s bold example will be followed and other works, such as those of Bernard Shaw for instance, will be rescued from neglect or timid drawing room interpretation and infused with flair and originality.
The Adelaide Review, No.138,May, 1995, p.37.