STAGE
An Inspector Calls, Novello Theatre
4/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Director Stephen Daldry's award-winning and visionary revival of JB Priestley's classic chiller returns to London for a short run.
REVIEW
A dilapidated telephone box stands at an angle, like a drunken grenadier, and, to its right, the boards of the theatre splay and bow, hit by some unseen bomb. That's the first clue that this revival of JB Priestley's classic is going to be emphatically askew.
The curtain rises. Downstage, rain-swept cobbles where Lowry-esque urchins kick through puddles in the gutter. Upstage, a glittering doll's houses on stilts erupts from the street, a Faberge egg opening to reveal its treasures.
It is a staggering set, designed by Ian MacNeil, and one itching to show off its panoply of dramatic fireworks but for now, this one will do - for silhouetted under a street lamp stands trench-coated Inspector Goole, re-creating the iconic image from The Exorcist. He's out to snare him some devils.
Stephen Daldry's ambitious, award-winning, punctilious production, back once more in London, is the reason "revival" is in the dictionary.
Re-imagined, polished, expanded (the core cast of seven is supplemented by a dozen or so silent extras) and choreographed to within an inch of its life, the Billy Elliot director gives the hoary am-dram familiar a miraculous new sheen.
The story is well known - and flawless. A comfortable Midlands family, the Birlings, celebrate the engagement of daughter Shelia to Gerald Croft giving dad Arthur (David Roper) the chance to expand on his theories of wealth acquisition, self-reliance and social division.
Into this cosy pomposity sidles Inspector Goole who tells them a girl has killed herself hours before. He proceeds to examine their foibles and prod their self-satisfaction until they unwittingly reveal how each of them had, in turn, contributed to her downfall. The twists and turns are shattering.
In this overtly political piece (written after the second world war when Priestley was advocating a Labour government's egalitarian agenda), the Birlings one by one descend from their lofty home into the muddy gutter.
Daldry finds comedy too, notably in the figure of the matriarch Sybil (a glorious Sandra Duncan) whose bickering descent from stately galleon to sunken paddle steamer is tweaked neatly for laughs.
Goole (Nicholas Woodeson) and Sheila (Marianne Oldham) hold the moral centre of the piece with affecting power and subtlety. The Inspector rages wildly at the thoughtless mores of the me-first capitalists while the erstwhile prig of a daughter performs the only genuine transformation of the piece.
They are more than ably supported by Roper and Duncan while Robin Whiting (Eric) keeps his performance the right side of indulgent adolescent self-pity.
Daldry's tics and additions - the mute presence of a phalanx of common folk to watch and judge, the direction culled from film noir and the silent era - settle the era and the politics but it is the house on stilts, bowing under the weight of the guilt (and gilt), that makes this the definitive modern revival.
Until November 14.
