In 1994 director Stephen Daldry (The Hours, The Reader) made his Broadway debut by directing a revival of J.B. Priestley’s thriller, An Inspector Calls. The production won Tony Awards for Best Revival of a Play and Daldry won his first Tony Award for Best Director of a Play. (He won a second Tony for directing Billy Elliot: The Musical.) He has returned, so to speak, to the scene of the crime with this revival opening at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts for a run through February 10th.
In Priestley’s play, Inspector Goole shows up at the home of the Birling family. They are an upper middle class English family celebrating the engagement of their daughter, Sheila, to Gerald Croft. Goole is looking into the suicide of a young woman who Goole suggests left behind a diary that includes the Birling family amongst her entries.
This three-act play, performed without an intermission, has long been regarded as Priestley’s scathing commentary on society. It was first performed in 1945.
Liam Brennan plays Inspector Goole. The Birlings are played by Christine Kavanagh and Jeff Harmer with Lianne Harvey as their daughter Sheila. Also included in the cast are Hamish Riddle and Diana Payne-Myers.
When Daldry first tackled the play in England in 1992, critics found he had brought new life to a play that can be rather creaky at times. But through finely-honed performances and a very stylish way of telling the story, Daldry found ways of making this oft-studied piece of theatre much more accessible and intriguing.
The timing of the return of this play, about the haves and the have-nots and what a responsible society should be doing, clearly makes An Inspector Calls not just a commentary about lives then, but our lives today.
This production comes from the The National Theatre of Great Britain and is the only West Coast appearance of the play.