A Story Worth Repeating

Four years ago, veteran British actor Kenneth Cranham was getting ready for the opening of his first stage play in five years--”An Inspector Calls,” at the Royal National Theatre--when he happened to run into an older colleague on the street.

No sooner had the two thespians caught up with each other’s activities than the elder man asked Cranham the question many in the London theater were surely wondering about, though they were perhaps too polite to ask.

“He said, ‘Why are they doing that old thing?’ ” recalls Cranham with a chuckle.

Why indeed? Well, call it a long shot.

The J.B. Priestley play--which opens at the Ahmanson Theatre on May 15, with a cast headed by Cranham and Stacy Keach--is a 1946 drama with political overtones. It’s a British warhorse few would have pegged as a likely candidate for a popular revival that would transfer to London’s West End, where it’s still running.

Even more unlikely, however, was that it would become a hit in the U.S. But it opened on Broadway in 1994, ran for a year, took home four Tony awards and has been on tour since last September.

American theatergoers are not, after all, known for their support of even mildly political theater. And any nonmusical, let alone one that’s colored by class politics, is going to have a tough time on a Broadway where prohibitive costs and dwindling audiences have become the rule.

“Sure, everybody told me I was mad,” snorts theater and film producer Noel Pearson (“My Left Foot”), speaking by phone from the set of his next film, on location in Ireland.

“But that just made me want to do it,” he continues. “That means that there’s something good about it.”

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Of course, there were many here who had their doubts as well. “I didn’t think it would be a success,” says Broadway producer Jack Viertel, who’s known for his hit-finding radar and who is not involved in this production. “I thought it would quickly fade, but audiences really loved it. I loved it.”

“An Inspector Calls” was, in fact, well-received in New York. The New York Times’ David Richards, for instance, called it “one of the more astonishing spectacles on Broadway.”

That success caught even the show’s director, Stephen Daldry, off guard. “Yeah, we were surprised,” he says, speaking from London’s Royal Court Theatre, where he is artistic director. “Everybody was taken aback. We underestimated it.

“Obviously I was worried whether people would think it was Communist propaganda,” Daldry continues. “But it’s always a mistake to underestimate the intelligence of the audience.”

“I hoped that it was going to be a hit,” says Pearson, who won a Tony Award for his Broadway production of “Dancing at Lughnasa” and another for “An Inspector Calls.” “But I never knew it would be such a big hit.”

The question is why.

Some say the credit goes mostly to the 34-year-old Daldry, who radically re-envisioned the story, set in Edwardian England, of an investigation into the death of a poor young woman that ends up casting suspicion on every member of the upper-crust Birling family.

“It’s a success because it’s been re-imagined so, and the director has done such a remarkable job of turning it into a theatrical experience,” says Viertel. “It’s like a great political ‘Twilight Zone.’ ”

Others say the thanks go to set designer Ian MacNeil and his collaborators who fashioned a massive, apocalyptic landscape dominated by a towering mansion that opens itself up, collapses and pulls itself back together during the course of the play.

And still others say it’s the story. “ ‘An Inspector Calls’ in some way resembles a classic western,” says Cranham, who plays the title character, Inspector Goole (as in ghoul). “The guy rides in and he rides out at the end. It’s like ‘Shane’ or something.”

Daldry himself ascribes the popularity to a combination of factors. “It’s a very strong thriller, and that does transcend boundaries,” he says. “The metaphorical language of the play is also not cultural specific.”

Daldry--who has also turned such theatrical dark horses as Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal” and Arnold Wesker’s “The Kitchen” into box-office Cinderellas--first read “An Inspector Calls” in 1989.

At that time, the play was widely regarded as a cobwebby staple of the bygone days of British theater. “In the old repertory system, it was done to death,” says Cranham, 51. “It’s well-known by people a bit older than me.”

The reason for its former popularity was that it’s an ensemble piece with a number of good roles for both men and women. “Each component [of the stock acting ensemble] is well represented, so it was fantastically popular,” Cranham continues.

In 1989, however, it was no longer so frequently performed. “Professionally, it’s not done,” says Pearson. “It’s normally done [in] amateur [stagings], in colleges or whatever, always in a box set like a drawing room.”

It is, in other words, analogous to a number of plays that crop up with regularity in community theaters in the U.S. Jan Stuart wrote in New York Newsday that the play “has as much recognition value overseas as ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ in America.” But even in Britain, that familiarity wouldn’t necessarily mean the play would have a market in a major production.

Daldry, therefore, had his work cut out for him when he began assembling his team for the Royal National production.

Cranham, for one, was persuaded in part by the text. “I’ve [performed] a lot of difficult writing in my time, but this play has a great clarity to it,” he says.

Besides, the actor knew this wasn’t going to be “An Inspector Calls” business as usual. “Ordinarily, it would be a play about domestic manners,” says Cranham. “But the director was very honest. He showed me a model of the set.”

Originally staged at London’s Royal National Theatre in 1992 and brought back for a second engagement there before transferring to the West End in 1993, “An Inspector Calls” won three Olivier Awards.

When it arrived on Broadway in 1994, Cranham was the only holdover from the British cast. The matriarch and patriarch of the Birling clan were played in New York by Philip Bosco and Rosemary Harris.

Of course, the last of the principal performers--the physical production--also made the crossing. And that may be the most basic reason why “An Inspector Calls” has done so well.

From the pre-curtain sequence of World War II sounds and sirens and an opening nighttime scene washed in pouring rain, to the final tableau of a group of outsiders peering at the action from a distance, the staging is operatic.

It is also full of theater wizardry. “Most people go to a musical for special effects,” says Pearson. “It’s unusual to see special effects in a straight play.”

Additionally, much of the action is underscored, which provides the drama with a momentum familiar to today’s audiences. “It’s done cinematically,” says Pearson. “It has a cinematic score [with] a bit of [the soundtrack from the film] ‘Vertigo’ and some original music.”

Here in the U.S., Daldry’s bells and whistles were right in sync with today’s technology-heavy Broadway. And they may have also helped make the play’s message go down more easily.

“The production itself is so extravagant, the morality steps in the door gently,” says Pearson. “The Inspector does give a speech to the audience, but it’s not [didactic] morality.”

American audiences, after all, were more likely to resist the political moralizing. “It has a very hectoring tone politically, which we’re not used to,” says Viertel.

New Yorker critic John Lahr, in fact, found this problem overwhelming. “‘An Inspector Calls’ is not really a play--it’s a speech,” he wrote. “The message is community, the link of every man to every other.”

But Daldry disagrees. “The message is broad and humanistic, rather than political with a dogma attached,” he says. “People find that it’s not a cynical play, but a hopeful play. It’s a liberal humanist vision.”

Yet that doesn’t necessarily preclude its value as entertainment. “Primarily it’s a thriller, but I don’t think people withdraw from the moral debate,” says Daldry.

The American tendency, after all, is to view the drama as more domestic than political. “Americans see the play differently, as being about a family,” says Cranham.

“It’s very different than playing it in England where they feel slightly guilty,” he continues. “Americans, even if they’re right wing, don’t feel as guilty. Americans regard theater as entertainment.”

What Ahmanson audiences will see is a touring version of “An Inspector Calls,” with Cranham and Keach joining the road company only in Los Angeles.

It has done well on the road. “It went out on tour last September and it finishes in August,” says Pearson. “You never would think it, but that play did phenomenal business in Arizona.”

Accordingly, the producers are exploring other options, such as taking the play to Toronto. “The problem is to get a place where we can have a long run,” says Pearson. “You’ve got to have a deep stage because of the rain, but most of the [theaters] are too big.”

Cranham won’t necessarily reprise his role elsewhere, he says. “I’ve done the play over 700 times,” he says. “You don’t normally do a straight play so many times.”

But the tour has proven that this production has legs without him. And the actor, for one, is not surprised.

“In the ‘40s, there was a real attempt to make a fairer society and [this play] epitomizes it,” he says.

Daldry also believes the success ultimately comes down to what the play’s about. “Because it was written at the end of the war, it’s a romantic play,” says the director. “It’s seeking a new vision, trying to articulate [whether] we want to go backward into a new morality or forward into a new way of organizing our society.

“As we reach toward the millennium, people are asking themselves those questions,” he continues. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do it. I’d been brought up under Thatcherism. In the late 1980s, the same choices were upon us. We seem to be losing sight of the fact that there is such a thing as society. That is a very current debate, not just in Britain, but everywhere.”

The bottom line, concurs one of the men who watches the bottom line, is the meaning of “An Inspector Calls.” “No matter how spectacular the production, the play wouldn’t be the success it was if it didn’t mean anything,” says Pearson. “This is a ‘90s kind of play in that it’s against greed. It’s very relevant today and that’s what’s a hit.”

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“An Inspector Calls,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens May 15. Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.; Thursday matinees, June 13, 20 and 27, 2 p.m. $15-$50. Through June 30. (213) 365-3500.