by J.B. Priestley
Directed by Jim Mezon
At the Festival Theatre
April 17-November 2, 2008

    An Inspector Calls isn’t meant to be played on the purely realistic level and it isn’t in Jim Mezon’s absorbing production. Ostensibly a detective story, it is, in fact, a morality play in which a criminal investigation into the death of a young woman leads gradually but cumulatively to the moral indictment of an entire family. Peter Hartwell’s design mixes realism with symbolism, providing a colonnade, windows and balcony, an elevator, a large clock, and interlocking but movable floor-planes. The floor pieces do move slowly, almost imperceptibly, the shifts evoking a sense of changing perspective or of time grinding on. The Edwardian dining room of the prosperous Birling family in the north of England is suggested by the furniture, but in place of chandeliers there are heavy chains or cables that move as the mysterious elevator moves, its heavy door clanking, The looping chains can also be read as emblems of “the chain of events” referred to specifically in the dialogue. Kevin Lamotte’s extraordinarily effective lighting deepening a sense of the eerie. Then there is the fleeting spectre of a young woman (the suicide who killed herself by swallowing disinfectant) that doesn’t add anything, of course, to the plot, but is an optical effect suggesting something vaguely gothic. And composer Paul Sportelli’s score, inverting the customary relationship between dominant and subordinate themes, is lean but clever, employing only a single piano and a single-line melody, a single chord, or a single note to accompany the play’s inexorable movement towards its conclusion.

   All very good but something damaged at the very beginning by the figure of Inspector Goole (isn’t his name too obviously portentous?) slowly wandering the empty set in a prologue that adds nothing to the mystery. He is brought on much too early and for what purpose? He should remain shadowy (a figure emerging out of English fog and soot, as it were) until he actually sets about his function as moral interrogator. This is precisely how the late Tony Van Bridge played him in an earlier version of the play at the Shaw, but Benedict Campbell elects to interpret him as a stock detective, quiet and unnervingly persistent but not terribly ominous. Priestley pushes towards allegory, which can be a challenge to performers who have to find a way of seeming to transcend the text while remaining believable as flawed, culpable human beings.

   The play is artificial, of course, but the fun lies in guessing Goole’s rationale for a collective indictment of the Birlings. In other words, the play is eminently theatrical—not in an Agatha Christie mode but as a J’accuse of social, political, and ethical proportions. Every Birling is held to account: the father for firing the victim from his factory when she agitated for higher wages; the daughter Sheila for costing the girl her next job in Sheila’s dress-shop; Sheila’s fiancé for exploiting the girl as his mistress; and Mrs. Birling and son, each in their own way. This shouldn’t normally be the stuff of suspense, but it is in this case because of the skilful dialogue and characterization. Moreover, the moral implication—that we are all responsible for one another because our true nationality is mankind, as H.G. Wells held—goes vigorously against the common grain in capitalist society.

   Mezon and his cast emphasize the generation gap between the parents and their children, and this does lead to an interesting dialectic, though I have seen all the roles played better in earlier versions of this play. Peter Hutt and Mary Haney as Mr. and Mrs. Birling lean too much in one direction in their acting, but both have strong stage presences and can hit top notes easily if rather stridently. Moya O’Connell’s Sheila is fervent, while Graeme Somerville’s Gerald Croft (her fiancé) is appropriately smug. As Eric, the weak, drunken son, Andrew Bunker has dramatic impact, and Mezon’s choreography keeps him at the outer edge of things like someone haunted and haunting. But the one figure who should be the true harrower isn’t enough of one in this case, because Benedict Campbell’s Goole is simply conventionally shrewd and efficient rather than strikingly other-worldly or spiritual. He is cogent but without real inner fire. In other words, he is a cool cop rather than a policeman with an avenging angel within.

Photos: David Cooper

pic 1 (L-R): Benedict Campbell (Inspector Goole), Mary Haney (Mrs. Birling),
Andrew Bunker (Eric Birling), Peter Hutt (Birling), and Moya O'Connell (Sheila)

pic 2: Peter Hutt and Moya O'Connell



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