An Inspector Calls: Priestly’s Dated Play Falls Short John MacDonald: London Correspondent If all one looked at were the awards and accolades J.B. Priestly has received for An Inspector Calls (upwards of seventeen major theater awards from New York and London) then he or she would have a hard time expecting any less then a enjoyably moving evening at the Playhouse Theater. Instead, the experience I had last evening in London was far from moving, and it was only enjoyable for its endearing campiness. Though the production had its heart in the right place, the overblown acting, set designs and simple-minded messages had me giggling when I shouldn’t have and smiling when there wasn’t a happy face on stage. Written at the close of WWII and set before the first World War, Priestly’s successful thriller/drama focuses on an Inspector Goole (Neall Buggy). He calls upon the well-to-do Birling family to ask them questions about their relationship to a young women, Eva Smith, who has just committed suicide the day before. His relentless probing unravels layer upon layer of connection between the Birlings and the poor girl and how their interactions indirectly led to her suicide. The audience is meant to understand the connections between all the members of this (or any) society, from the poor children mutely present around the play’s edges to the great business tycoon Mr. Birling himself (Edward Peel) and how each member’s actions have consequences for others. Even when the family realizes they’ve been duped by Goole — who turns out not to have been an inspector giving information about any actual suicide at all, the more humane members of the family, such as Sheila (Emma Gregory), the daughter and the son Eric (Andrew Leonard), still remain deeply shaken. But before the curtain closes, we find out from a mysterious phone call that a young woman has just committed suicide in the same manner Goole described. For all Priestly’s well meaning messages of community and solidarity, no one wants to be hit over the head with them more times then is healthy. I certainly found myself getting ill by the time the Birling household, a claustrophobic little one room affair elevated by stilts, crashed to the ground amid sparks and shattering china — a horribly kitschy affair. Aside from the endearingly pathetic performance of Eric, the acting remained trite and overblown. To bring home a message of such humanitarian import, one needs an acting style built on restraint, and subtlety, not trickery and cliche. Stephen Daldry’s direction fails to convey much more then a cartoonish interpretation, made all the worse by the intimacy of the Playhouse Theater, of Preistly’s classic work. Sounding like a soundtrack to a Stanley Kubrik film, Eyes Wide Shut comes to mind especially, the play’s score, though often hauntingly beautiful, felt utterly out of place in Daldry’s production. The play failed to match the eerie despair of the music, which instead succeeded in nearly parodying the work it was trying to enhance. However, there was hope to be found in Wednesday’s performance. The set worked well to convey the separations along class lines that so marked English society at the beginning of the 20th century, and still do today. The poor children playing in the rain at the play’s outset, and the mute family maid chained to every whim of Mrs. Birling (Diane Fletcher) contrasts sharply with the doll house-like Birling home towering above them on stage. And though Buggy’s portrayal of Goole is flawed in ways, he maintained well his position as representative of the lower and middle classes especially when members of these classes stood on stage with him as he destroyed the Birling family’s facade of innocence. I really wanted to like this play. I wanted to find solace in its glorification of the community, in its unique sets and in its plot twists and unambiguous characters, but the performance of An Inspector Calls I sat through was just too blunt, too easy and too ridiculous to take very seriously. Though the messages of the play are timeless, Wednesday’s performance was marred by how utterly dated it seemed. It felt like watching a bad Hollywood film, not an award-winning play.

October 12 November 2

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