Sydney Reviews

Everything old is new again.

One of Sydney’s oldest theatre companies, Genesian Theatre Company has opened its new space with a production of J.B. Priestley’s timeless classic, An Inspector Calls.

Akin to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, An Inspector Calls is a kind of morality play where members of an affluent family form a quorum of suspects, each complicit in the alleged death of a young woman.

Crafting the play with all the tools of traditional drama, Priestley presents a cat among the pigeons scenario pitting materialists against an investigating moralist.

The curtain rises on an opulent dining room in 1912 where factory owner fat cat, Arthur Birling and his snob spouse, Sybil, has presided over a dinner to celebrate the pending nuptials of his daughter, Sheila, to Gerald Croft, son of Arthur’s major commercial competitor. This union bodes well for a merging of the companies creating a potential opportunistic monopoly for his manufacturing empire.

The impression given is that Arthur regards his future son in law a better bet in furthering the family fortunes than his own flesh and blood son, Eric, a spoilt idler and dipsomaniac.

Arthur has a rather inflated sense of himself as a captain of industry although his business acumen is suspect when he espouses the integrity of the soon to be launched ocean liner, Titanic, and dismisses the gathering winds of war in Europe with the ignorance of a climate change denier.

Into this postprandial posturing by the pitiless industrialist arrives an unexpected visitor, an inspector with the ominous name of Goole. He has come about the recent death of a woman and through systematic interrogation reveals that everyone in attendance had an interaction with the deceased and in this regard may be culpable in her demise.

Co-directed by the company’s power couple, Ali Bendall and Mark Bull, Genesian’s production of An Inspector Calls boasts a sumptuous and plush set design by Bendall and Bull, costumes by Susan Carveth and superb sound and lighting design by Michael Schell.

The core of the play, of course, is in its title. It calls us to inspect our own social responsibilities and moral accountability. Its enduring relevance is a call to rise above selfish complacency in a hopeful community quest for equality and kindness.