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AN INSPECTOR CALLS by J.B. Priestley
reviewed by Jane Sunderland It is always a pleasure to be part of a full house, especially one in which the audience is with the performance every inch of the way. In this Dukes production, there is an audible gasp from the auditorium when Mrs Birling lets slip that the father of the unborn child being carried by the young woman who came to her Committee for help apparently drank too much – the dramatic irony being that we then know, but she doesn’t (with her characteristic insularity and blindness), precisely who that father must be. When the telephone rings at the end we are as silent and tense as those on the stage. And all this despite the fact that many of that same audience would have been familiar with the play and its famous double end-twist. Performing in an unchanging set of an opulent, elegant, comfortable dining room, with tall windows and high ceilings, the cast do full justice to Priestley’s clever, taut text, using overlapping speech as well as pauses to good effect. And it is frequently funny. The most interesting role in the play has to be that of Inspector Goole (Christian McKay), whose social observations about collective responsibility makes him an unsettling, unreal, authoritative character, rather than making the play didactic. And McKay is not afraid to play down these professionally-unusual features of a police investigation. Robert Whelan is convincing as head-of-the-family Arthur (‘everyone should look after their own’) Birling, rattled temporarily (but only temporarily, and principally about his expected knighthood) by the exposure of his apparent part in Eva Smith’s death. Christine Mackie’s Sybil (Mrs) Birling really comes into her own when it is time for her interrogation, sticking to the conviction that her decision to reject the young, unmarried pregnant woman’s appeal for help was ‘justified’ on the grounds that ‘fine feelings’ (the young woman’s desire to protect her ineffective protector) simply could not be valid for someone ‘of her class’, and at the same time shifting responsibility entirely onto ‘the man who is responsible’. This is, of course, her own son Eric (Samuel Collings), a pathetic character at the start of the play but who grows throughout it, nurtured by genuine guilt, remorse and an increasing, discomforting realisation of social mores. This he shares with his sister Sheila (Miriam Hughes), whose earlier more articulate awareness of what is happening (“you mustn’t build a wall between us and that girl”), and of their parents’ denial, is treated as impudence. At the end of the play Sheila and Eric are speaking with one voice, suggesting Priestley’s optimism about the possibility of social and psychological change through the younger generation, and indicated in this production by their eventual physical closeness. Somewhere between the parents’ self-righteousness and denial, and Eric and Sheila’s new, raw understanding, is Sheila’s businessman fiancé Gerald (played suitably coolly by Peter Prentice). While the play opens with the family celebrating their engagement (and possible future business links), it concludes with Sheila and Gerald’s future together being in serious doubt: although Gerald is honest about his own part in the young woman’s apparent downfall, he has too much to lose in admitting his and the Birlings’ social power and collective responsibility in her death, and is instead triumphant in his discovery that ‘Inspector Goole’ does not, in fact, exist. So just who (or what) is/was ‘Inspector Goole’? Unlike the 1954 film version, in this production we are left to make up our own minds. Written in 1946 and set in 1912 (with WW1 looming, but dismissed by Mr Birling), the question has to be asked about the relevance of The Inspector Calls to today’s audiences. Certainly I do not see this audience’s involved response as a purely aesthetic one. Not everyone might express it in this way, but surely we all know at some level that some people’s economic gains still require others’ losses, and the more enduring those gains, the more that seems right to the winners, and the more insistent their self-defence. © Jane Sunderland 20/10/07 Thursday Oct. 18 – Saturday Nov. 10, 2007 Tickets & times: Tue-Thu, 7.30pm £13.50 (concs. £9.50). Useful websites A guide for teachers and students
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