Stage Review: ‘An Inspector Calls’ at the Wallis
Playwright J.B. Priestley’s social drama, An Inspector Calls, directed by Stephen Daldry (The Reader, The Hours, Trash, TV’s The Crown, Billy Elliot) and now playing in the Bram Goldsmith Theater at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, unspools a dastardly tale of one woman’s demise in sometimes shocking, sometimes compelling and often dreary and distracting detail. Its theme that each individual must morally serve others or be damned unfolds with predictable moralizing. The exclusive West Coast engagement at the Wallis, which runs an hour and 45 minutes without an intermission, plays through Sunday, February 10.
This uniquely staged version was revived in London in 1992 after the original play’s run following its premiere in Soviet Russia (which, with the play’s anti-capitalist ideals, is fitting). This version won awards during runs in the West End, Broadway and elsewhere, including Los Angeles at the Ahmanson theater in 1996. Besides the very convenient Wallis venue in tony Beverly Hills, An Inspector Calls currently tours theaters in Washington, DC, Chicago and Boston.
The talented Mr. Daldry reimagines the original 1945 script, which is set in 1912, about an inspector who abruptly imposes himself on a wealthy English family, interrupting their dinner party with an accusatory and quite pointed inquiry about what he claims is the death of a young woman. The capable cast includes Liam Brennan in the title role, Christine Kavanagh as Sybil Birling, Jeff Harmer as Arthur Birling, Andrew Macklin as Gerald Croft, Lianne Harvey as Sheila Birling, Hamish Riddle as Eric Birling and Diana Payne-Myers as Edna. As prospective son-in-law Gerald, Mr. Macklin (TV’s Mr. Selfridge, as well as King Lear and The Picture of Dorian Gray in theater) fares best, though there wasn’t a bad performance.
As the mysterious visitor interrogates each family member, one by one, about the apparently suicidal young woman’s demise, a strong presumption of guilt emerges. As it does, those in the audience may watch and wonder: why is each character prejudged as bad? Who, besides the unseen and mysterious woman presumed to have killed herself, is conceivably to blame?
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Everything in An Inspector Calls revolves around these questions and the answers become dreadfully and glaringly obvious as the play’s morality, altruism with a collectivist-socialist twist, becomes clear. With stark, dramatic music by Stephen Warbeck and elaborate staging specifically designed to accentuate and dramatize the idea that no one is self-made and everyone who’s wealthy, productive or successful must come down, really crashing down, to the level of the common man to whom he’s tethered, An Inspector Calls rings and rings its smashing climactic points.
A mob gathers in silent, condemnatory moral judgment, like a Me, Too march (there’s admittedly an air of that lynch mob movement’s influence throughout the production) as the angry white male inspector demands to know about an act of charity for which the giver is presumably supposed to be guilty: “How much did you give?”
Amid an unasked and unanswered question of paternity, bestowing of blankets for the rich and the unspoken conclusion that money is the root of all evil (with you as thy brother’s keeper), the family’s house literally crumbles, crashes and explodes as the Birling family comes undone.
Or do they? On top of the socialistic moral mystery, the raging and elusive police inspector implants the question “How do we know (what we think we might know)?” Therein lies the play’s deeper mystery that nothing is knowable and, unless you renounce yourself, property and individualism, you are likely to be doomed…at least to the extent these things can be known. This is the upshot of An Inspector Calls, officially billed as “the National Theatre of Great Britain’s Landmark production of J.B. Priestley’s classic thriller An Inspector Calls”. If it sounds rather tedious, it is and can be, depending on one’s tolerance for seeing the same ideals laid bare in moralistic melodrama, if with inventive staging and a booming score to match.
Tickets to An Inspector Calls range $35 to $105 and are on sale now for shows on weekdays at 7:30 pm; Saturdays at 2 pm and 7:30 pm; and Sundays at 2 pm and 7 pm. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Zoltan Paliis of Studio Pali Fekete architects and located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, is housed in the building featuring the restored, original 1933 Beverly Hills Post Office, the 150-seat Lovelace Studio Theater, space for arts education and the 500-seat Bram Goldsmith Theater.