PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Theatre Royal Bath (Tue 4-Sat 8 Oct)

THEATRE Written in 1945, as Britain reeled from a financially ruinous war and clamoured for a welfare state to look after its impoverished, exhausted citizens, J.B. Priestley’s great play manages the rare feat of having things of substance to say on both the personal and the political. It’s also, of course, a cracking thriller – wrongfooting, unnerving, and by the end profoundly and rewardingly ambivalent.

On the one level, you can read ‘An Inspector Calls’ as the implosion of an well-to-do yet inwardly rotten family, as the revelations and insinuations of the sinister Inspector Goole lure each of them into confessions, accusations and revelations of vulnerability and neglect. Beneath that, there’s some angry commentary about the exploitative ways of the industrial bourgeoisie – be it for cheap labour, sex or their own fragile self-regard, each member of the Birling family have abused the poor dead Eva Smith for their own end.

It’s 1912, and we’re in the fictitious Northern industrial town of Brumley. Arthur Birling, a bluff, pompous factory owner and town worthy, hosts a dinner to celebrate the engagement of his daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, a remarkably suave, self-assured son of a rival industrialist. All seems impossibly perfect in the Birlings’ affluent, cocooned world (apart, perhaps, from Sheila’s younger brother Eric, who seems to drink rather eagerly and who irritates his father with his socialist views).

This all changes, though, with the arrival of one Inspector Goole, and his news of the death of one Eva Smith, a pretty young working-class girl who has committed suicide that afternoon. One by one, it emerges that each of the family is implicated in Eva’s decline and lonely death – first to be revealed is the father’s callous sacking of her from his factory after an abortive strike, and this is the least shocking of Goole’s revelations. Towards the end, though, Priestley brilliantly muddies the waters – is it even the same girl whom each family member has abused? Is she even dead? How much, if at all, might this exonerate anyone?

It’s an ingenious, and constantly gripping piece of theatre: and along the way we learn a great deal about both the dysfunctionality simmering beneath the Birling’s affluent savoir-vivre, and the high-handed way in which they and their Edwardian ilk abused the urban poor for their own ends, and the real human cost of Edwardian England’s world-conquering affluence.

Stephen Daldry’s staging is, in the main, simple and atmospheric, if a little curious at times. The Birlings’ house is a half-scale model of an imposing, Victorian end-of-terrace home, and looks hugely impressive on stage – until you realise that the cast all have to stoop significantly to exit through the French windows. As a metaphor for their safe, enclosed world, far from the angst and hardships of the working-classes, the house seems very apt, but this problem of scale gets, frankly, a little distracting. However, when, after Goole’s damning revelations, the elegant dining-room tilts on its axis and goes up in smoke, it’s hard to think of a more striking image for the coming of war, and the end of Edwardian protectionism and privilege. Aside from the staging logistics, the diminutive house may be a metaphor for the Birlings' soon-to-be-shrinking world, to add to the feeling of nowhere-to-hide claustrophobia. Whatever, to see the actors squeeze themselves in and out is not an especially pretty sight. Elsewhere, meanwhile, there’s a slight over-reliance on deafening, portentous, Wagner-esque music to drive home the sense of foreboding.

The cast range from decent (Geoff Leesley, hearty enough but lacking a little patriarchal bluster as Arthur Birling) to superb (the younger generation, more honest and empathetic – Kelly Hotten’s Sheila, John Sackville’s Gerald and, especially, Henry Gilbert’s Eric, pictured). To see the apparent relish they take in Inspector Goole’s probing questions, and the family barriers of smug seemliness these break down, is hugely invigorating. Priestley’s language, too, is a pleasure to hear, a fine mix of naturalistic and satisfyingly snappy. “I don’t know where to begin,” pleads Sheila at one point. “Then don’t begin,” snaps back her father.

By the end, Priestley’s play has become many things: an intriguing, provocative riddle on truth and illusion, an indictment of the selfish Edwardian industrial bourgeoisie, and a bulldozing through the secrets, resentments and withheld love of an emotionally repressed British family. Neither his script nor this slightly over-soundtracked staging is exactly subtle: but, intellectually and dramatically, it has enough fireworks to blow apart a world far bigger than the Birlings’. (Steve Wright)

Copyright Steve Wright 2011

Picture: Robert Day