Making the Mundane Stellar : British theater director Stephen Daldry took an English perennial, ‘An Inspector Calls,’ and peeled back layers that nobody else saw. Then he hit Broadway

It was the chance of a lifetime. Invited to direct at the prestigious Royal National Theatre, up-and-comer Stephen Daldry could suggest the play of his choice.

So what did Daldry choose J.B. Priestley’s “An Inspector Calls,” a staple of English schools, radio shows and amateur companies.

“It is just about the most performed play in England,” concedes Daldry. “There are hundreds and hundreds of productions each year.”

Not like this one. Daldry turned Priestley’s drawing room mystery into a dark psychological thriller and played up its social commentary. His production, which opened at the National in September, 1992, was so popular it later toured Britain and moved to the West End’s Aldwych Theatre.

Daldry’s “An Inspector Calls” drew great reviews, solid houses and four Olivier awards. “One went in a state of duty,” recalls Guardian theater critic Michael Billington, one of many English critics to rave about the show. “But he releases the hidden beauty of the play.”

Many New York critics were equally complimentary when the show recently opened on Broadway.

New York Times critic David Richards, for instance, credited Daldry with turning the Priestley potboiler into “one of the more astonishing spectacles on Broadway right now.” And Associated Press critic Michael Kuchwara concluded his review suggesting that Daldry join his cast onstage for curtain calls.

Along with such contemporaries as Nicholas Hytner, Sam Mendes and Deborah Warner, Daldry is among a handful of young British directors who have received increasing attention and accolades in the British press. With “Inspector” making such a splash on Broadway, 32-year-old Daldry now joins Hytner, director of both “Miss Saigon” and the current Broadway revival of “Carousel,” as someone to watch on both sides of the Atlantic.

Back at home, things also couldn’t be much better for the one-time circus clown. Just a few weeks ago, his National Theatre production of Sophie Treadwell’s play, “Machinal,” won four Olivier awards, including Daldry’s second in a row for best direction of a play. Currently artistic director of London’s prominent Royal Court Theatre, Daldry has been mentioned as a possible successor to Richard Eyre as head of the National Theatre.

It was largely Daldry’s innovative productions of Spanish and German plays that landed him his first National Theatre assignment. But his most recent achievements at both the National and Royal Court have been successful revivals of English and American plays, including the lesser-known “Machinal” and Arnold Wesker’s “The Kitchen” as well as “Inspector.”

Daily Telegraph critic Charles Spencer wrote that Daldry reminded him of a “canny antiques dealer. . . . He picks up other people’s disregarded tat for a song and then performs a brilliant restoration job that reveals the work to be far more valuable than anyone previously suspected.”

Consider the possibilities with “An Inspector Calls,” for instance. An inspector comes by to notify the upper-class Birling family, home celebrating their daughter’s engagement, that a young, lower-class woman has committed suicide. As the evening unfolds, that death is linked to every member of the family in one way or another.

“We reckon that 20% of the audience has been in the play,” quips Daldry. “And when we played in Bradford, where Priestley comes from, we reckon 70% of the audience has played the Inspector.”

Part of the appeal is “Inspector’s” surface simplicity, suggests Kenneth Cranham, the actor who plays Inspector Goole in New York as he did in London. “ ‘An Inspector Calls’ has a simplicity like a medieval morality play, or a Western,” says Cranham. “The guy comes to town and rides off.”

Cranham is the only Broadway cast member who started with the show in England. Co-starring Philip Bosco and Rosemary Harris, the New York production also uses live music rather than recorded, and incorporates a more sophisticated rain effect.

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But Daldry’s Expressionist staging of the play hasn’t changed in crossing the Atlantic. On Broadway, the Royale Theatre’s stage also rakes at an odd angle, says designer Ian MacNeil, to make everything seem out of kilter. And the Birling home is again a life-size doll’s house balanced on stilts, allowing for some dazzling stage tricks.

Daldry, who first tackled “Inspector” in the late ‘80s for York Theatre Royale, indicates he was attracted as much by the play’s politics as by its staging potential. Priestley, who did weekly wartime broadcasts, wrote the play in 1944 in hopes of prodding his countrymen to a Labour Party victory after the war. Its first production was in Moscow (in August, 1945), not London.

“An Inspector Calls” is set in 1912 Yorkshire, but Daldry surrounds the Birling house with a 1940s landscape of war, despair and poverty. The play’s terrain is a wasteland filled with poor, dazed children and adults who occasionally serve as witnesses, a chorus to what is happening onstage and, by inference, in contemporary England.

Daldry hammers home Priestley’s points about the inter-dependence of society, a message the director also tries to make timeless. The Aldwych Theatre’s program contrasted comments from Priestley and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and actor Cranham notes that Inspector Goole’s final speech on social responsibility was “particularly important” to director Daldry.

“ ‘Inspector Calls’ was written for the 1945 general election, so it is a call to arms,” says Daldry. “What appealed to me was (Priestley’s) wanting to say the past is not right and we need to reach forward into the unknown. Now it’s a much more cynical time, where idealism tends to be derided as something that’s spurious, not of value.”

Priestley morality plays seem a long way from Daldry’s early years studying clowning. After graduating from Sheffield University, where he first started directing, Daldry trained with Italy’s Il Circo di Nando Orfei. Intrigued by the nature of clowning, he says, he signed on as an apprentice clown and toured Italy for nine months. He performed three times daily, riding unicycles, juggling, fire-eating, playing sousaphone and bagpipes.

He next went to Paris, spent some time there “chilling out, really,” then headed back to England. He worked at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, did free-lance directing in regional theater, then landed at the Gate Theatre in London’s Notting Hill area as artistic director.

At that time a 60-seat theater (it seats about 120 now), the Gate specialized in English premieres of foreign work, both contemporary and classical. Daldry was known to fill its tiny stage with 25 actors and such spectacular effects as the actual building of a bridge onstage.

The idea, he says, was never to treat the Gate like a small theater by doing one-set or two-character plays. Instead, he says, he tried “to find a large theatrical language within this incredibly enclosed space (and) do epic plays so it really felt like they were bursting through walls. “

He was at the Gate from ’89 to ‘92, during which time it won many awards, got a lot of press coverage and as Daldry put it, “managed to get quite a high profile quite fast.” Before he had left the Gate, he says, he’d come up with both National assignments.

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American playwright Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 drama “Machinal,” which closed earlier this year at the National, “was a play that I’d been wanting to do for a long time,” says Daldry. “I couldn’t find a way of doing it at the Gate, and the (National’s) Lyttelton stage had everything that I needed for it.”

“Machinal” (French for “machine-like”) tells the tale of a Young Woman who kills her husband, goes on trial and is sent to the gas chamber. Drawing on every bit of the huge Lyttelton stage to create a threatening, mechanistic world, Daldry and designer MacNeil used everything from steel curtains that open sideways to metal ceilings and grids.

In Daldry’s “Machinal,” machines overshadowed people, life was played out within terrible confines and the walls were closing in. The drama was as precisely choreographed as it was designed, and secretaries typed, tore paper and tapped pencils to a distinctive, monotonous beat.

“He has a natural relationship to nightmare,” says actress Fiona Shaw, who just won an Olivier for her performance as “Machinal’s” Young Woman. “Both ‘An Inspector Calls’ and ‘Machinal’ seem to share (a nightmare’s ) terrifying disassociation of images. There’s a very safe play in ‘Machinal,’ and I knew Stephen would embrace the most dangerous aspect of it.”

Daldry embraces stage dangers with the support of a creative team he has worked with since Notting Hill’s Gate Theatre. He brought that team to Broadway as well, where they drew their share of favorable notices for “Inspector.”

Set designer MacNeil, son of PBS journalist Robert MacNeil, and Daldry both live and work together. Composer Stephen Warbeck and lighting designer Rick Fisher have sometimes taken over such directing chores as giving notes to actors or leading rehearsals, Daldry says. Daldry and MacNeil not only use stage props and fixtures in a way reminiscent of Peter Sellars’ staging, but they also suggest the dark, visual richness of such Coen brothers films as “Barton Fink.” Equally cinematic, implies actress Shaw, is Daldry’s way of shaping a play: “He did masses of choreography and pared it away,” says Shaw. “He built a sort of enormous world and used the bits of it he liked.”

His world these days is largely the Royal Court, the well-known Victorian theater across from Sloane Square. The place that launched John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” and Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” the Royal Court has been home to many of England’s best writers and, for the past few years, Daldry as well.

The Royal Court is an unassuming place, and Daldry appears similarly unassuming. He rides a bike to work in London, as he also has in New York, and has a boyish, self-effacing charm that actors and interviewers alike always mention.

Named in 1991 to succeed Max Stafford-Clark, the Royal Court’s longtime director, Daldry worked with Stafford-Clark for 18 months, then began running the place himself last fall. When he was in New York readying “Inspector” for its Broadway opening, he still went back to London each week from Sunday to Tuesday and talked every morning to his office there.

Daldry and the Royal Court are encouraging new writers, in part through a playwright exchange program with Los Angeles’ Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre. The Court also has about 30 writers a year under commission, Daldry says.

New York critic Richards called Daldry “ a showman with a conscience,” and the director concedes he is drawn to what he calls “serious drama. . . . When one wants to change the world, there are many ways of doing it. God knows, it needs it. My particular way of doing it is through theater.

“The last few years, particularly in this country, have been a search to try and create a new language in theater. The stories are changing and the ways in which those stories are told are also changing. . . . Regular theatergoers are sort of going, and one has to find that new generation of theatergoers (that) tends to be younger and has different interests.”

Meanwhile, he’s managing the afterlife of “Inspector.” Productions are already set for Tokyo, Melbourne and Toronto, he says, and given the show’s reception in New York, an American tour would appear likely. Daldry reports interest in a film remake--a 1954 movie version starred Alastair Sim as Inspector Goole--and says a few other potential film projects “are in the pipeline.”

Daldry is clearly ambitious, but asked if “Inspector’s” success gives him a sense of freedom, he says no. “Quite the reverse. Success is always a burden, really. People are right that success means your next failure is that much closer.”*