Director's Note

J.B. Preistley’s most celebrated work, An Inspector Calls, has an interesting history. Written in a single week, and first performed in Moscow in 1945, the play’s heavy, consciously didactic, post-war socialist messaging meant that it received a fairly lukewarm reception upon its debut in London later the same year. Conceived by Preistley as an expressionist piece, that original - mostly conventionally staged - production served for years to color perceptions of the play as a humorless, solemnly sententious political tract, of limited artistic or dramatic merit. Rarely performed professionally over the course of the 20th Century (though it became a mainstay of amateur societies in the English-speaking world), the play was “re-discovered” in the early 1990s, in a famous production at the National Theatre in London, since when opinions of its worth have steadily increased.

My first encounter with the script came when I was cast to portray the role of Inspector Goole, in a modest production in Dublin. As a fan of consciously old-fashioned suspense genre works like The Twilight Zone, I was naturally struck by the ambiguous circular ending, and the unresolved mystery of the Inspector’s true identity. For this production I have deliberately drawn on those influences to enhance the (often ignored, or glossed-over) potential supernatural implications, and striven to guide the play’s - often blunt - rhetorical language into a deliberately hyper-real parable of the circular nature of human history. By seeking, in our own way, to better honor the playwright’s original, non-realistic intentions, it’s our hope that we can clearly convey this play’s timeless message of empathy and collective responsibility, as relevant today as ever.

Owen Lindsay

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