An Inspector Calls

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

Everyone knows Marx’s description of how history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. But this rote revival of Stephen Daldry’s 1992 production of JB Priestley’s 1946 play, itself set in 1912, suggests different stages of theatrical repetition: first as urgent socialist critique, second as postmodernist revision, and finally as commercial taxidermy.

It’s a curious irony that the National Theatre of Great Britain’s production, which, 20 years ago, recognised that a stage revival demanded immediacy, should now seem so distantly of its time. First staged in the immediate aftermath of Thatcherism, the aesthetic Daldry pursued has similarly come to define its era: playful, knowing and full of restless quotation. There is the self-conscious framing device of vintage red theatre curtains and Hitchcock music, the brilliantly preposterous dimensions of Ian MacNeil’s neo-expressionist design, and a performance style balanced somewhere between epic and comic.

Like Priestley, a writer keen to experiment but keener to display his socialist bona fides, Daldry’s production has a message that it communicates with megaphone subtlety. The Birling family, self-involved capitalists all, are first glimpsed in lavish celebration through the windows of a sealed doll’s house on stilts. When Tom Mannion’s Inspector Goole arrives to investigate the death of a working-class girl, whom each family member may have driven to her suicide, the house splits open, exposing them to ruined cobbled streets and the silent glare of working-class extras. It may have been written as a drawing-room thriller, but this insular world will be turned inside out.

The production remains a triumph of design, but it has hardened into a museum piece. Subordinated to the looming set and bombastic sound, Goole shouts his accusations or addresses the audience in Brechtian parody, while Kelly Hotten’s charming Sheila and Geoff Leesley’s dissolute Arthur, the siblings who provide the play’s troubled conscience, move around as elegantly and mechanically as the figures of a cuckoo clock.

Peel away the commentary and irony, the production suggests, and Priestley’s plotting wouldn’t rival a below-par episode of Midsomer Murders. But nothing seems more stale than recent history and without Daldry’s social context the play becomes wearisomely haranguing. “We are responsible for each other,” Goole tells us. “If men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.” The inspector is done with us, but the play is not; making the point, remaking it, then reviving it. Without the supporting context of Priestley’s post-blitz solidarity, or Daldry’s post-Thatcher finger wagging, it’s hard to know how to respond, other than silently promising to never kill another servant. The show may offer an impressive spectacle, but without refreshing its purpose it has all the resonance of a time capsule.

Runs until Feb 18