Review: An Inspector Calls at the Lyceum, Sheffield

Sadly, on opening night at the Lyceum in Sheffield, it was also, quite literally, its downfall.

Just as actress Christine Kavanagh – monstrous matriarch Sybil Birling, haughty as Elizabeth I with red hair, pale face and dark lips – made her sweeping descent of the precarious metal staircase in huge bustle skirt and lace-up boots, she slipped and fell.

Worse still, visibly shaken herself, she landed on veteran co-star Frances Campbell, elderly house servant Edna in the play, and knocked her to the floor.

The audience gasped – was this intentional, or an accident? – as the shocked cast tried valiantly to regain composure.

Kavanagh made brave ad-libbed attempts to check, whilst in character, whether ’Edna’ had been hurt, to grasp hold of her lines and resume.

But the curtain came down, a stage manager popped up, the play was paused and a first aider rushed on.

As we all know, the show must go on – as it has for over three decades since director Daldry premiered his interpretation of the classic JB Priestley thriller in 1992.

Some 31 years later, his version is now a classic in its own right, winner of 19 major awards, the longest running revival of a play in history, seen by over five million theatregoers worldwide.

On opening night in Sheffield it did feel four million of those were there with us in the form of a gigantic school party studying the text for GCSE.

Mobile phones lit up, snacks rustled, drinks bottles fizzed and teachers did a lot of shushing. But it wasn’t long before the tension of the play overrode the temptation of distractions. By the end the teenagers were immersed, even cheering when the Birlings’ daughter with a conscience, Sheila, slapped cheating fiancé Gerald, and whooping as well as applauding at the end.

You’d hope it will be a production that lives long in their memories. I last saw the show in 2012 and the eerie, unsettling, stunning scenery by set designer Ian MacNeil is something that has remained vividly in mine.

The drama begins in the gas-lit lamplight of the Birling family’s 1912 drawing room, a fragile home of disconcerting proportions whose walls swing open like a doll’s house.

We peer in as pompous, prosperous northern industrialist Arthur Birling and his family toast Sheila’s engagement. We strain to hear the smug confidence of their conversation above the clink of champagne glasses and jowly jollity.

But everything is uneasy and jarring and strange.

As smoke swirls and real rain pours, we see the house is, in fact, perched perilously on a bomb crater from the 1940s’ Blitz. The curtains are tattered, the glass of the nearby phone box is bombed out and smashed. Sheila’s silk dress, the height of post-Edwardian fashion, is filthy at the hems from the dirty war-rent streets. The inspector, when he calls, is dressed in the belted mac, fedora, suit and shirtsleeves of 1945.

The play might be set, mostly, in 1912, as the Great War is looming – along with it the end of the middle-class luxury, servants’ bells and staff that people like the Birlings had enjoyed. But JB Priestley wrote his tense thriller cum moral judgement play at the end of the Second World War, a time of hope for a shift in society away from the selfishness of capitalism, the inequity of wealth, the injustice of the powerlessness of the working class. Clearly, those themes are as pertinent today as they ever were.

Liam Brennan as Inspector Goole, or should that be ghoul, haunts the family as more of a visitation than a police officer, to investigate the tragic demise of a young woman named Eva Smith, for which each one of them is partly to blame.

He breaks down their lies as he breaks the fourth wall to stalk onstage from the stalls, appear in the wings and point up into the balcony to warn the audience as well as the characters about every individual’s role in the collective ripple-effect responsibility of society.

An Inspector Calls may be a classic psychological thriller approaching its 80th year. But when, at the end, the family get the chilling call, and the moralistic judgement is set to begin again, it’s still truly terrifying.

They are characters from the past trapped by the future in a purgatory of their own making, the hellish torture of their interrogation going around on repeat.

• An Inspector Calls is at the Lyceum, Sheffield, until Saturday, May 6.