AN INSPECTOR CALLS. To 10 May.
Oldham.
AN INSPECTOR CALLS
by J B Priestley.
Coliseum Theatre To 10 May 2008.
Tue-Thu; Sat 7.30pm Fri 8pm Mat 30 April, 10 May 2.30pm.
Audio-described 30 April 7.30pm.
BSL Signed 9 May.
Runs 2hr 5min One interval.
TICKETS: 0161 624 2829.
www.coliseum.og.uk/an-inspector-calls
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 April.
Artfully-plotted social drama mixes judgement and chills.
Thankfully, director Robin Herford hasn’t been tempted down the expressionist route explored triumphantly by Stephen Daldry’s 1989 production. It’s a path that has left many an inferior wreck in its wake. Instead, Herford has found a style that matches the play’s appearance of realism with the non-realistic elements that lie within J B Priestley’s play.
Written towards the end of the Second World War, it is set in the 1912 home of Arthur Birling, a businessman confident there is no such thing as society (“community” is Priestley’s term), as his daughter Sheila becomes engaged to the son of another local manufacturing dynasty, the Crofts.
Priestley usually presented the ‘Edwardian’ age as a golden time. Here, his Inspector talks of “fire and blood and anguish” if people don’t learn to live with regard for each other. It’s the writer’s call to his own post-war age of reconstruction.
At Oldham, designer Michael Holt makes the Birlings’ room a cold, brooding space, receding towards the rear so that when they sit round the dining-table there, characters seem diminished, cornered and remote. It’s here they reassemble when they feel a reprieve from Inspector Goole’s shocking news. Only the young siblings who learn from it remain detached and ultimately find their own space diagonally across from the others.
As each character comes under scrutiny in the story the Inspector pieces together, their portrait is revealed, smug and huge, through the walls, a gallery that fades as they recover their composure, before being replaced by the image of the young woman they each helped drive towards suicide.
Christopher Wilkinson is interesting casting as Birling; a slight figure, he gives thought to each of his claims about the prosperous time, and reacts with a degree of conscience at times. It’s Eileen O’Brien’s wife who sits solid and accusatory in her chair, centrally, warding off the Inspector.
Paul Webster gives him a rhetorical expressiveness in voice and gestures, sometimes more fittingly than others. But in his mackintosh he’s clearly separated from the formally-dressed diners. With good work elsewhere in the cast, this is an Inspector worth calling upon.
Eric Birling: Peter Bramhill.
Sheila Birling: Natalie Burt.
Gerald Croft: Gregory Finnegan.
Sybil Birling: Eileen O’Brien.
Arthur Birling: Christopher Wilkinson.
Inspector Goole: Paul Webster.
Director: Robin Herford.
Designer: Michael Holt.
Lighting: Thomas Weir.
Sound: Lorna Munden.
2008-05-05 16:29:19