The National Theatre of Great Britain’s successful 1993 production of An Inspector Calls is making a new swing through the USA in a production once again directed by Stephen Daldry. In its three-week stop at the Wallis, the play (by J.B. Priestley) dazzles with its technological wizardry: a toy-like, collapsing house on stilts, eerie war-torn landscape, gloomy storm clouds, nightmarish music and sound effects. If Hitchcock were a stage director, this is how he would have gone about mounting this play. Priestly, a socially-conscious writer, looks at class dynamics in his 1945 thriller. We meet the Birlings, a rich, selfish Yorkshire family celebrating the engagement of their daughter Sheila (Lianne Harvey) to an even richer, snottier industrialist, Gerald Croft (Andrew Macklin). While the Birlings and Croft drink and guffaw at the party, strange, homeless creatures scurry around outside, fighting over scraps of garbage, looking for shelter when thunder and rain strike. Into this blighted social landscape comes an inspector (Liam Brennan), who brings news of the suicide of a poor local gal who worked for the Birlings for cheap, insufficient wages. As the inspector points out, everyone in the room bears responsibility for this waif’s death. His accusations are treated with scorn and derision by the older rich folk, who couldn’t care less what happens to poor people, but at least Sheila has a shred of morality in her character and finds herself siding with the inspector. This shocks the hell out of Gerald (and her parents) who lash into her for being such a wimp. Priestley’s attack on the one-percenters of his time has obvious relevance today. An Inspector Calls has important things to say about predatory capitalism, but unfortunately Daldry’s direction ruined the play’s message. A charter member of the Louder School of Acting, he has instructed his key characters to keep shouting their lines at each other. Their strident, unmodulated voices began to grate on my nerves and made me want to flee the theater long before the play ended.
