JB Priestley’s classic thriller An Inspector Calls comes to the Gaiety Theatre this week highly acclaimed by critics all over the world; Stephen Daldry’s production has won more awards than any other play in history, including a Tony for Best Direction and Best Revival. Needless to say then, it’s good. It’s also, presumably, big budget what with almost twenty years of success (this production alone) and Daldry’s name to it. He’s also the man behind lauded films Billy Elliot, The Reader and The Hours and has been nominated for an Academy Award for all three. It’s commercial value is immediately evident with lashing rain pouring from the rafters, a striking film noir musical score and a stunning set (Ian MacNeil) greeting us on curtain-up to assure us we are in for a real theatrical event.
The set really is something. MacNeil’s surreal and split-level design sees the play’s usual Edwardian drawing room-setting (standard pre-Daldry’s revival in 1992) transform into something far more expressionistic. The comfortable upper-middle class home is now an Alice in Wonderland-style suspended dolls house, which can barely contain the Birling family’s high dinner-party laughter, clinking champagne and class-anxious, over-inflated egos. Alongside this grotesque version of pre-war 1912 high society are images of blitz-ed out London; street children running ragged around dirty cobblestones; a red telephone box with smashed glass panes, suggesting a ravaged England after World War Two. These temporal tricks add much to the show’s already political agenda, by simultaneously addressing cause and effect, both on and off stage.
The play’s theme also still seems fairly relevant. Whether a man should look out for himself and his family or whether he should have a wider societal conscience. The play clearly purports the latter and some critics saw Daldry’s original 1992 production as a critique of Thatcherite Conservative politics, with Inspector Goole’s final speech reading as a direct rebuttal of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s well-known statement “There is no such thing as society”. The Inspector who arrives to disturb the celebrations at the Birling household comes with a strong and not-so-subtle political message: we are all responsible for each other. The case is made by apportioning blame to each member of the family for individual wrongs done to a young working class girl, and collectively charging them as guilty for her suicide.
When it is suggested that perhaps the whole thing was a hoax, some characters are happy to return to pre-Inspector status, having learnt nothing while others are unable to do so after the revelation the Inspector has brought. It begs the question, sung by pop sensation Rihanna: are you sorry or are you sorry you got caught? Who is responsible for the poor and powerless? The state? You? Me? Priestley’s Goole warns if the Birlings cannot learn their lesson they will learn it in time; in blood and anguish. The onstage suggestions of World War Two use history to confirm it and hint at future tragedies if we will not listen. If we are to apply the message to the crisis our own time, should we wonder if the recession had all been a great ‘piece of bluff’, would we really have learned anything? Hopefully, but not certainly. We still live in a capitalist society where commercial values hold sway. I enjoyed the spectacle and the big staging, but I’m not sure that’s the social-reform message Priestley would have wanted me to take.
C.M. McHugh
