If there were a society for the preservation and restoration of aging plays, the British director Stephen Daldry would deserve the presidency.
Taking a 1946 potboiler by J. B. Priestley, "An Inspector Calls," he has transformed it into a steadily engrossing drama and, more significantly, one of the more astonishing spectacles on Broadway right now. An equivalent act would be turning a Nash Rambler into a Bentley or a tugboat into a phantom schooner. Against all odds, something that was functional and boxy has been made dark and gleaming and elegant.
Yet another import from London's fertile nonprofit theaters (via the West End), "An Inspector Calls" was unveiled last night at the Royale Theater. It is as much an eye-opener as the triumphant revivals that have preceded it this season, "Carousel" and "Medea." Perhaps even more so. After all, "Carousel" and "Medea" are timeless works of art. Priestley's drama is rooted in old socialist credos and preachy injunctions, inspired partly by the horrors of two world wars, that we all must try to take better care of one another from now on.
The action is set in 1912, but with the help of an exceptional designer, Ian MacNeil, Mr. Daldry has removed the play from its usual Edwardian drawing room and relocated it in a once-and-future landscape. The earth is covered with cobblestones, the brooding sky is slate gray or bilious yellow and the houses of the rich (doll houses, actually) perch above the desolation on stilts. At the center of the stage stands a stone mansion, the home of the Yorkshire factory owner Arthur Birling (Philip Bosco) and his family. All golden bright within, it could be a jewel box. But when the curtain rises, the walls are closed up and we have to peer through the windows, like the urchins and scavengers below, to catch a glimpse of the engagement party unfolding inside.
The festivities are soon interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious inspector (Kenneth Cranham), who wants to question the family members about the suicide of a destitute young woman. All of them, it appears, are implicated in her death, although the threat of a public scandal bothers them considerably more than any wrong they may have done her. In vintage, not to say hoary, mystery-play fashion, the inspector keeps plugging away with the questions until, one by one, the characters crack and confess their role in the affair.
Mr. Daldry, the newest boy wonder of the British theater, has been just as inventive with the detective-story conventions as Mr. MacNeil has been with the set. The inspector is stationed outdoors under a towering lamppost, and the smug family members are obliged to come down from their gilded aerie and submit to the inquest in the rain-soaked bleakness. Mrs. Birling (Rosemary Harris) is allowed a carpet to cushion her step. But before long she is groveling in the filth with the rest of them. Their sullied clothes will soon come to rival their sullied souls.
Contributing to the ominous climate, townsfolk emerge from clouds of fog to witness, passive and hollow-eyed, the fall of the House of Birling. All the while, Stephen Warbeck's music is busy underscoring critical moments in the drama with rumbles from the bass drum and shrieks from the cello. Then, when the Birlings' alibis have been completely demolished and their moral ignominy exposed, the house itself collapses, lurching forward and spilling its fancy contents onto the ground with a clatter.
If that were all, the evening would certainly be startlingly surrealistic and worthy of the gasps it provokes. But Mr. Daldry adds yet another element by giving the intermissionless production the feel of a perverse music-hall entertainment. The proscenium arch of the Royale, which is shedding its imitation gold leaf, looks to have barely made it through the blitz. Some of the planking is coming up. Tucked away in the pit, the four-piece orchestra spits out its dissonance, while the actors, blazingly lighted by Rick Fisher, venture to the edge of the stage now and again and speak their lines directly to the audience.
Mostly, though, it's the performances themselves that explode the conventions of Priestley's well-made dramaturgy and the decorous acting it once fostered. They are emphatic, pitched high, purposely inflated, I think, to match the inflated sense of importance that the Birlings have of themselves. Mr. Daldry is asking the cast to tread a delicate line here. Pushed too far, actors can quickly become vaudevillians. In fact, the usually excellent Mr. Bosco, harrumphing mightily, should be reined in instantly, lest so much huffing and puffing blow the set down before its time.
The others, however, manage the trick of being oversized without being overdone. Wrapped in red velvet and strung with pearls, Ms. Harris is at her imperious best, using her perfect diction to put inferiors in their place, or, when that fails, withering them with civility. As the wastrel son, Marcus D'Amico, and Jane Adams as the coquettish daughter, have the fatuousness of privileged people who haven't thought much about their lot in life. Then a bulldog of a detective obliges them to. Mr. D'Amico discovers the terrible pain of hurting others and Ms. Adams lights up with a passionate social conscience, while Aden Gillett, as her pompous fiance, drops his superior poses and seemingly subtracts a foot from his height. Their remorse is convincing, and thoroughly misleading.
Mr. Cranham, the one holdover from the London cast, is harder to pigeonhole. Most of the time, he's your usual imperturbable investigator in a trench coat, but then he'll suddenly turn on one of the Birlings, push his jowly face in theirs, and you get the brief if distinct impression that he's about to bite. The character is named Goole, as in "ghoul," if that's a clue. It is, sort of. "An Inspector Calls" is one of Priestley's "time" plays, dramas that toy with the usual workings of the clock and leave you with the sense that something vaguely metaphysical might be going on. Let's just say that Mr. Cranham's deftly unsettling inspector is not from Scotland Yard.
The eeriness, in fact, is the salvation of "An Inspector Calls," which can be ponderously didactic in places, insisting, as it does, that the world's riches are inequitably divided and that the little folk are ruthlessly exploited. If we don't mend our ways, Priestley cautions, someone well may mend them for us. Mr. Daldry, however, finds blazingly original stage imagery to support and revitalize the musty platitudes.
It is the playwright's not too surprising perception, for example, that given half a chance, self-centered people are quick to resume their self-centered habits. But it is the director's inspiration to have the Birlings' ruined house rise off the ground, put itself back together and close its walls once again on the rabble, as if nothing had ever disturbed its magnificent exclusivity.
Mr. Daldry is a showman with a conscience.
An Inspector Calls By J. B. Priestley; directed by Stephen Daldry; sets by Ian MacNeil; lighting by Rick Fisher; music by Stephen Warbeck; sound by T. Richard Fitzgerald; special effects by Gregory Meeh; production supervisor, Jeremiah J. Harris; musical coordinator, John Miller; fight director, B. H. Barry; associate producer, PW Productions Ltd. The Royal National Theater production presented by Noel Pearson, the Shubert Organization and Capital Cities/ABC, in association with Joseph Harris. At the Royale Theater, 242 West 45th Street, Manhattan.
