AN INSPECTOR CALLS

Stephen Daldry's iconic production at Wyndham's Theatre

13.01.10

It's seventeen years since Daldry's breathtaking rethink changed the way we saw Priestley's drawing-room Morality Play for ever. Its impact is still just as strong, as it nears the end of yet another spell in the West End.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it is a filmic concept, opening out the middle-class interior to a hostile wasteland, using a crowd of supernumeraries, and a stirring score [by Stephen Warbeck].

Principals as well as extras are meticulously directed by Daldry, who came back to tweak this transfer. But the actors manage to find their own individuality, nonetheless. Nicholas Woodeson is a fast-talking Inspector, ratcheting up the tension as he smiles and snarls at his victims, coaxing and cajoling them into confessing their culpability.

Equally impressive were Sandra Duncan's grande dame Sybil – her downfall all the more telling for her haughty froideur – and Marianne Oldham as her daughter, torn between hedonism and compassion. Robin Whiting as the heavy-

drinking son and heir, gave a performance that was beautifully judged emotionally, and physically absolutely convincing.

And I must mention Elizabeth Ross's wonderful Edna, a bridge between the two worlds, emphasising the universality of the piece. She must bring the age range on stage up to something approaching eighty years – children roam the bomb site, gaze in awe at the Birling house on stilts, and act as Curtain Raiser and Hat Stand for a benign Inspector Goole.

An Inspector Calls

Little Baddow Drama

19th November 2009

Jim Hutchon was at the Memorial Hall ...

Director Ken Rolf staged this as an unashamedly, dead-pan melodrama, complete with dramatic lighting and sombre, film-like music. Set in an over-stuffed Edwardian dining room peopled by over-stuffed Edwardians, the play concerns a police inspector who shatters the smug complacency of a family celebration by revealing the complicity of the family members in the downfall and suicide of a young mill-girl.

Michael Gray played the bluff, northern patriarch with characteristic pompous energy and barely suppressed outrage, conscious of the danger of a public scandal to his knighthood aspirations. Vicky Tropman was very convincing as his snooty wife, too thick to understand her complicity in the matter. From a slowish start, the two youngsters in the family, Sarah Trippett-Jones and Iain Miller went on to steal the show. She completed a beautifully judged conversion from air-head to a prescient young lady, while he, as the rake about town who finally did for the mill-girl, actually managed to look sick at the realisation.

John Peregrine’s enigmatic inspector was full of insights and accusations in a bravura performance that held the audience’s attention throughout, and Kenton Church played the daughter’s fiancé with great panache as he forensically revealed the possibility of a hoax in the inspector’s visit.

Though Priestley’s language and mannerisms are 100 years old, and the play is crammed with clichés, the director imparted an interesting freshness to the production which made for a thoroughly absorbing evening’s theatre.