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First Night Review: An Inspector Calls

An Inspector Calls is one of the most impressive productions in Oxford this Trinity.  It is a spectacular production brilliantly directed.  It opens with a finely choreographed display of child actors, combined with dominating sound, pouring rain and fog.  Out of this a small house emerges where an engagement party is being held. At this moment we already know how big the gap between student and real acting can be.

Stephen Daldry (who directed The Reader and Billy Elliot) knows how to open this play up to the GCSE audience which dominates (it’s a set text) but also to allow its deeper elements to come out. The dynamic between the interior and exterior of the onstage house is superb.  He also, helped by the fine acting of Inspector Goole, stops the play’s overt moralizing becoming nauseating. Instead of leaving irritated by the inspector’s warning speech that society must tighten its contract we leave unable to criticize, feeling all challenge to the play is a challenge to its message.

The cast are all convincing, from the thoughtless public school boy ‘varsity’ student to the works owner. They act us, and our future selves, well, and it is quite painful at times. Perhaps this is the reason why the audience was basically free of students.

Birling’s daughter is finest, not fully trapped by the prejudices and lack of consideration of her parents’ generation but also not being a careless rebel like her brother.

It’s a play with such a powerful preaching message that one might be concerned it’s going to annoy. It doesn’t, so go.

Five stars out of five

 

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