An Inspector Calls – Review – Bradford Alhambra Theatre

By Sue Dean, April 2025

In Stephen Daldry’s enduringly audacious touring production of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, the curtain rises not on Edwardian opulence, but a grim, dirty street. At its centre, an ornate dolls’ house teeters on stilts—precarious, exposed, and out of place, like the family within it. Initially bewildering, this visual metaphor gradually reveals itself as ingeniously symbolic: a fragile illusion of respectability, cracked wide open by the persistent knock of moral accountability.

Inside, the Birlings are celebrating an engagement with smug detachment, their brittle laughter echoing against the hiss of falling rain—yes, real rain—while fog creeps through the desolate postwar landscape that designer Ian MacNeil conjures with eerie precision. It’s 1912, but we are keenly aware that we’re seeing the play through a 1945 lens, and indeed, through our own. Time, in this production, bends and folds like paper.

The house quite literally unfolds too. When Inspector Goole arrives, the shell of the Birling home swings open, sending its occupants tumbling into the cold grey world beyond their comforts. Enter Tim Treloar, giving a performance of simmering intensity as the enigmatic Inspector. With a single stare, he cuts through privilege and pretence. He doesn’t miss a beat—his suppressed rage, his precise diction (even amid occasional sound muddiness), and his gliding movements across levels of the set suggest a man who knows far more than he says. His presence electrifies.

“Brilliant staging”

There is humour too, most notably from George Rowlands as the drunken Eric. He brings welcome levity to a darkening narrative, stumbling through his shame with pathos and comic timing. Yet even his laughter curdles as the family’s sins are laid bare.

Leona Allen’s Sheila Birling offers a performance of poignant transformation. Introduced in a pristine, bridal-white gown—soon soiled by the storm and her own disillusionment—she becomes the moral centre of the play. As her gloves are lost and her dress ruined, her understanding deepens. It’s an intelligent, emotionally resonant portrayal, though at times her lines are drowned in the storm of onstage shouting and crashing crockery.

The most gasp-inducing moment arrives when the house itself shudders forward in a spectacular coup de théâtre, scattering plates, cutlery, and illusions alike. It’s a literal collapse of bourgeois certainty, a brilliant staging choice that leaves the audience—many of them students—gasping, then applauding rapturously.

The production revels in spectacle: fire, smoke, and that glorious downpour serve as both sensory thrills and moral foreshadowing. Daldry doesn’t shy away from bold symbolism. Extras dressed as working-class citizens drift ghost-like in the background, reminders of the unseen millions whose lives intersect with ours, just as the Inspector warns. It’s unsubtle—yes—but so is Priestley’s text. The overt theatricality aligns with the play’s blunt moral messaging: we are all responsible.

“Masterful timing”

Costuming, too, tells a story. As the family unravels under the Inspector’s probing, their dinner jackets and pearls fall away. The visual undressing mirrors their moral exposure. Even Goole sheds his layers, piece by piece, his coat first folded by Sybil Birling then angrily tossed aside, a neat metaphor for her fleeting sense of guilt.

The final reveal—handled with masterful timing—brings the house and audience full circle. The famous moment landed with chilling clarity. The audience’s collective intake of breath said it all.

What makes this Inspector feel so fresh, even 80 years after it was written, is how thoroughly it dares to reinvent itself for each generation. Daldry’s staging is not without flaws—the occasional spatial confusion, the overindulgence in metaphor—but it pulses with contemporary urgency. As theatre for today, it demands our attention, and perhaps even our change.

This An Inspector Calls is a moral wake-up call dressed as a theatrical spectacle—and a reminder that the sins of the past echo loudly through the present.

‘An Inspector Calls’ is at Bradford Alhambra until 3rd May
images: Mark Douet