Stephen Daldry
An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley
Norwich Theatre Royal, 1995
Director Stephen Daldry’s ground-breaking production of An Inspector Calls first opened at the National Theatre in September 1992. Robin Seavill spoke to him about this latest version of an old classic.
RS The production has won countless awards all over the world. What do you think is the secret of its success?
SD I have to answer that in a slightly different way. I think that one of the reasons why I wanted to do the play was that it’s very much a play about – and written for – the end of the war. JB Priestley had been terribly involved in creating that huge shift of consensus that resulted in the 1945 election for Labour, primarily through the Postscripts, but also his involvement with all the other aspects which were going on at that time like the Picture Post campaign. And the consensus was an extraordinary moment in domestic politics. It was very much across the different parties, it was very much about a real sense of yearning for a better Britain. However it wasn’t about returning to the mistakes of the Edwardian era but a moving forward and having, if you like, a Utopian sense of what society should be like. I think it was that huge romantic spirit at the end of the war which I was very interested in and wanted to capture, having been brought up for the last ten years under a very different much more cynical consensus. In a sense the cynicism is: “There cannot be a better society, and this is it. We can just make the mess work better.” But I think as we move towards the millennium, there is a real yearning for something else – “Why can we not try to create something better? Is this the pinnacle of our aspiration, or can we not reach beyond it?” And I think that people respond to that, I think people still find that romantic Utopian vision incredibly positive and incredibly moving. And I think that idea is not only across a whole variety of different ages, classes and political agendas, but also interestingly enough nationalities, so that you get the same feeling in Australia as you do in Japan, as you do in America. They connect with what apparently seems to be a very simple message but in fact is emotionally rooted to a very powerful plea for something new.
RS How did your ‘expressionistic’ staging of the piece come about?
SD All productions develop, it was very much a close collaboration between myself and the designer. But JB Priestley himself – and this play particularly – had always been perceived of as a warhorse, a rep standby, and that isn’t as he originally wrote it. There were two rather extraordinary productions of it in Moscow which were the first productions, and it wasn’t really until it came back to this country in 1946 that it was put into, for example, the dining room. Before that it hadn’t been. And JB Priestley himself always described himself as an experimental dramatist – look at his more extraordinary works such as Johnson Over Jordan, which he wrote with Benjamin Britten, or indeed his work with Hitchcock. I wanted very much to try to reclaim the production, and to see it again in what we hope is a staging much closer to what JB Priestley was intending, rather than the sort of production handed down to us.
RS In the preface to the published edition Priestley speaks of “a great crimson tent” with space beyond…
SD That’s exactly right. And from the research we did we always knew that he was looking for something very different. It’s a bit like an old painting basically, a painting which has been covered with dust and dirt for many years. We approached it like a work of restoration, trying to let the original colours, the original construction come shining through.
RS Priestley, along with Rattigan, Maugham and others, is part of the tradition of ‘the well-made play’ – do you foresee a revival of interest in that genre of playmaking now?
SD Well, there has been a huge revival of interest in Rattigan and in people like Rodney Ackland, and I think that’s fascinating. There was that great apparent sea-change of 1956–57 when the old dramatists were considered to be old-fashioned, bourgeois, uninteresting, when the angry young men came in. But in fact as Osborne himself said just before he died, he learnt a huge amount from Rattigan, and in fact the idea that we are now re-assessing a generation of playwrights that have been dismissed for the last thirty years is only right and appropriate.
RS We have this idea today of an antagonism between the two groups, and yet as you say, Osborne spoke well of Rattigan, and Rattigan was very enthusiastic about Joe Orton wasn’t he?
SD Exactly. And I think that apparent tension in fact didn’t exist.
RS There are also other genres like the verse dramas of Eliot and Fry – do you see them coming back at all?
SD I think that’s a different question!
RS Have you made any significant adjustments to the production for this tour?
SD The production has evolved since its first outing at the Lyttelton and we’ve improved it throughout its different journeys, both when it moved to America and when it moved to Japan. And so hopefully this is very much the best of all the different versions we’ve done.
RS How do you keep the energy going when you’re doing something for the second or third time around? Do you find you lose some of the initial impetus?
SD What’s so brilliant about this particular play is that you can constantly continue to mine it, you can consistently find new areas of interest, so it can be re-invented each time.
RS Do you find a change of cast helps in that respect?
SD Absolutely, because every cast is bound to bring their own sense of it to the stage.
RS Priestley’s play Dangerous Corner has also recently done the rounds – do you see him as the main man in this ‘classic’ revival?
SD There are others up there with him. At the Royal Court we’re currently focusing on revivals of Royal Court classics which for different reasons have not become part of the National Theatre repertoire and which we believe should be – plays like The Changing Room [by David Storey] or recently The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker. It’s terribly important that these are seen by new generations.
RS Do you do such plays in context or do you update them to bring out underlying themes which are relevant for today?
SD I think it’s terribly important that you keep them in period. The relationship between the period as it was when it was lived and the relationship between how one looks at it in hindsight are entirely different. And one draws parallels and themes and strands, also dreams and aspirations, which at the time may have been perceived in one context and retrospectively speak to us in an entirely different way.
RS Which is the most important for you, the drama of a piece of the message that you think it contains?
SD In the best plays the two should be indistinguishable. And in An Inspector Calls they are. In the end, whatever the message of it is, this is a jolly good thriller.
PS
My excitement and nervousness about interviewing a famous person may be evident in this. Stephen Daldry was still five or six years away from finding worldwide fame directing Billy Eliot for the big screen but I’d certainly heard his name around the place, this production of An Inspector Calls had made quite a splash for its inventive interpretation, and like many of us I’d first come across the play in school. I had even been in an amateur production of it myself (details here), but I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that, was I?
It was conducted over the phone one lunchtime in the middle of a busy working day when the poor man doubtless had better things to do than answer another bunch of dumb questions from someone writing notes for the touring programme. But in the event he was a complete gentleman who knew the game and he came up with the goods in spades. If I annoyed or bored him, I would never have known it because he was far too charming and generous to let me notice if I did. At least I was able to keep up with him in the theatrical history department – Osborne and Rattigan, check; Royal Court, check; verse plays of Eliot and Fry, check, though Rodney Ackland was not a name to me then (or now), so I studiously avoided following that up in an effort to conceal my ignorance.
On the other hand I’m disappointed (again) to see so many closed questions I asked, which only goes to show there is a knack to good interviewing that I was yet to learn. In 1995 it was years before I or anyone else would ever see a Graham Norton show. Back in those days people were still talking about Michael Parkinson as the gold standard, but while I still have happy memories of some of his most interesting guests – Peter O’Toole, Peter Ustinov, David Niven, Dr Jacob Bronowsky, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook, Richard Harris, the face of Don McCullin recalling some of his experiences as a war photographer in Vietnam – this rather suggests it might have been the quality of the guests themselves who made him look good, the old guard who’d told a story or two in their time and knew how to time a punchline, rather than any particular or unique quality he himself brought to bear. In such circumstances all the wise interviewer had to do was stand back and let them run through their repertoire. Old Parky himself, in my view, could sometimes be more opinionated than I liked, and he often let himself down with women he fancied.
People like Terry Wogan and Jonathan Ross have had a go as well, but Wogan I think relied too much on his own charm, thinking he could wing it, while Ross has gone all US talk show by planting himself behind a big fuck-off desk which does nothing to encourage intimacy and proper engagement between interviewer and guest – especially when the interviewer is raised up above the guest, a ridiculous show of vanity and misplaced ego. So I am happy to be of that great majority who happen to think Graham Norton is the current peerless exemplar of the craft, and in future, if I’m ever cast in the role of inquisitor again, I shall remember to ask open questions.
The rules are simple: ask the question then shut up and listen to the answer. And if they say something unexpected, be ready to pursue that rather than forge blindly on to the next question you’ve got written down. Remember that all the best interview questions start with a W – Who, What, Why, Where, Which (or How) – and all the worst start with a D – Do, Did, Don’t, Does, Didn’t, Doesn’t. The former are open and require at least a phrase or a sentence in reply; the latter are closed and if the interviewee has decided to play hard ball, they can simply say Yes or No, and then you’re screwed. If Mr Daldry had been so inclined, he could quite easily have left me floundering. In the event he was completely the opposite – interested, engaged and extremely ready to speak. In short, one of the Good Guys.
