Apparently, the original J.B. Priestley play is something of a classic. The first English production had Ralph Richardson as the titular inspector (and featured a young Alec Guinness). The 50's film version had Alistair Sim (I will definitely have to seek that one out). And Tom Baker played him on stage, something I would dearly love to have seen. But David Thewliss is pretty wonderful in this version, too. The rest of the cast (including Miranda Richardson) is just fine, too. My ignorance of mid century British theater served me well, because I had no idea what to expect going in. (Well, what I was expecting was proto-Agatha Christie stuff.) Turns out this is something of a parable/a ghost story/a morality play rather than a detective yarn. Very briefly, it is 1910, and a rich family (father, mother, young adult daughter and son) is celebrating their daughter's engagement with the scion of a the head of a rival firm and have just reached the post-prandial cigar stage, when an inspector calls. And he is not just chilly and brusque, he is common (broad Northern accent) and singularly unimpressed with the airs and graces of the family. (When informed by the father that he plays golf with the inspector's superior, the inspector just remarks that he doesn't play golf.) Very quickly they discover that the inspector's reason for coming is that a young woman has just died in hospital of a suicide, and that the father had something to do with it. Specifically, he fired her for persuading her fellow workers in his garment factory to strike for a living wage. But wait, there's more. The daughter got the same woman fired from her next job in a fit of pique. And the fiance had an affair with her, but abandoned her when it became inconvenient. Then the son got her pregnant! Then she went to a charity to get money to pay for lodging, and the mother, who was on the board, turned her away! Now at this point, this sounds like a rather ridiculous series of coincidences. And besides, none of them strictly speaking did anything illegal (except the son, and that was stealing from his own father's firm to give her money, which she accepted until she found out it was stolen). And indeed, the inspector (whose name, he revealed, was "Goole") leaves without taking official statements or anything (but not before delivering a fiery speech about how we must care for each other, and if we don't, we'll come to a hot end). After he's gone, the family feel awful, but pretty quickly the father and the fiance start having doubts. The fiance points out that he never showed more than one of them at a time a picture of the girl, so for all they know it could have been a different girl each time. And they only had his word for it that she was dead. They call around, and it turns out not just that no girl has died by suicide that night, but there is no Inspector Goole in the local constabulary. This makes the parents and fiance positively giddy with relief, but the children are sickened by them, because they know that whatever happens, they have treated the vulnerable with arrogance and contempt. But then the phone rings. The father answers it and his face drains of blood. It's the police. A girl has just died by her own hand and an inspector will be coming to pay them a visit...
Is it heavy-handed? No doubt. Is it quasi-religious? Possibly. Is it a timely call for a more extensive social safety-net, and union protections? Undoubtedly. A gripping little number. I'll definitely seek out the Sim version - after playing Scrooge, I'm sure he got a kick out of playing a spectral presence himself.
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