As for Daldry, 33, it’s hard to recall a more sensational New York debut for a director. Priestley set his play in the Edwardian England of 1912; Daldry and designer Ian MacNeil have placed it in an indeterminate time warp, a blasted postapocalypse wasteland of smoldering, rain-swept ruins above which rises, windows ablaze with light, the house of the industrialist Birling (Philip Bosco). He and his wife, Sybil (Rosemary Harris), are having an engagement party for their daughter Sheila (Jane Adams) and her fiance, Gerald (Aden Gillett). The party is interrupted by a mysterious figure, Inspector Goole (Kenneth Cranham), who’s investigating the suicide of an impoverished, pregnant young woman.
Goole’s third degree of the Birlings gradually rips aside their self-satisfied exterior to reveal the dark guilts beneath. This is a pretty creaky device in the ’90s, but Daldry gives it power and suspense through his thunderously nonnaturalistic staging with its echoes of H. G. Wells, George Orwell and Alfred Hitchcock. (Early Hitchcock films like “Sabotage,” with their doom-laden cityscapes, were in fact the models used by Daldry.) And the romantically portentous music by Stephen Warbeck is played by four musicians, who manage to evoke the symphonic punch of film composers like Bernard Herrmann and Erich Korngold.
While Daldry beguiles the audience with such stage effects as the collapse and eventual reassembling of the Birlings’ mansion, the net effect is not gimmicky. The director means to drive home Priestley’s postwar call to reconstruct a society that takes responsibility for all of its members. Priestley was tremendously popular from the ’20s to the ’40s (he died at 89 in 1984). “His wartime broadcasts,” says Daldry, “were as popular as Churchill’s. But they were stopped by Churchill, who thought Priestley’s tone was too radical.”
The play in fact was premiered not in London but in Moscow, in 1945. “But Priestley was no Marxist, but a liberal humanist,” says Daldry, who himself is a fascinating compound of political liberalism, theatrical postmodernism and commercial savvy. The son of a banker, he worked as a clown in an Italian circus, then joined a radical English theater group. In 1993, he took over the Royal Court, the fountainhead of new English drama since its discovery of John Osborne in the ’50s. (Jim Cartwright’s first play, “Road,” was produced there in 1986 and called the most exciting new play of the decade.) Daldry, who wants to establish a commercial branch of the Royal Court in the West End, has been talked about as the eventual head of the Royal National Theatre. He is a passionate fan of theater in the United States, especially of “a new generation writing plays about public issues-Howard Korder, Jon Robin Baitz, Keith Reddin, Suzan-Lori Parks. I have a feeling we’ll look back on this period as a golden age.” If that happens, Daldry, as director, administrator and catalyst, will he a big part of the gold rush.
