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BrumHour saw An Inspector Calls at the invite of The Alexandra.
By Dave Massey twitter.com/BrumHour
This production contains themes of gaslighting, descriptions of suicide and misogyny.
Review: An Inspector Calls at The Alexandra
⭐⭐⭐⭐”A dark absorbing morality tale”
Directed by Stephen Daldry, written by J. B. Priestley
In the early 1910s, a Police Inspector (Liam Brennan) arrives at the home of the Birlings, a well to-do family in a town called Brumley! He is investigating the suicide of a young woman connected to the family and in doing so exposes some very dark secrets held by them from each other.
The Birlings family are played by Evlyne Oyedokun as Sheila, Simon Cotton as Gerald Croft, her fiancé, Christine Kavanagh as her mother, Jeffrey Harmer as her father and George Rowlands as her brother Eric.
The play explores the impact of a person’s behaviour and how a collective of people can contribute to depression, poverty and a lack of social mobility. It uses specific examples of people trying to better themselves only to hit glass ceilings.
The set is one single room placed five feet in the air, accessed by a twisted staircase. The curved walls of the room open to reveal the room after the inspector arrives. We also see a street scene with rain and mist appearing at different points in the story. It is all very practically laid out and the distortion of depth creates an unsettling feeling on the stage. Even the curtain hangs to one side and the boards of the stage are curled up at the edge.
All of the cast are excellent with Evlyne Oyedokun being a stand out as well as Liam Brennan as the forthright inspector.
This is generally viewed as a educational play which is taught at English Literature GCSE, I’d never seen it myself and didn’t know anything about the story other than it being set before the First World War.
I really appreciated a chance to see it and its parallels with A Christmas Carol are unmistakable as past, present and future are all examined in this way and three main interconnected stories are explored.
A dark absorbing morality tale, An Inspector Calls is at The Alexandra until Saturday 3rd December 2022. Book tickets for this and forthcoming productions at The Alexandra using BrumHour’s affiliate link >> HERE <<.
