New UK Tour of Inspector Calls Starts 5 Sep
Date: 1 September 2000
A new national tour of the Royal National Theatre's award-winning production of JB Priestley's 1946 thriller An Inspector Calls launches next week. The 13-week tour, which runs concurrently with the West End production, begins Tuesday, 5 September, at Woking's New Victoria Theatre and continues to a further 11 theatres throughout the UK until 25 November 2000.
Following its opening at the National in 1992, An Inspector Calls transferred to the Aldwych Theatre in the West End for two years before embarking on an extensive international tour including Australia and New York. The current West End production opened at the Garrick Theatre in October 1995; it is now in its sixth year and is booking to January 2001. To date, the production, directed by Stephen Daldry, has won a grand total of 19 awards, more than any other play in history.
Written at the end of the Second World War and set before the first, An Inspector Calls begins in the seemingly comfortable and complacent world of the prosperous Birling family during a night's celebration. They are interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious police inspector who brings with him startling revelations about a local girl's death, in which everyone is implicated.
On tour, matriarch Mrs Birling is played by Rula Lenska, whose stage appearances include Double, Double, Same Time Next Year and Dangerous Corner. Her extensive TV credits include Boon, Minder and Cluedo. Inspector Goole is played by Paul Shelley, whose theatre credits include The Invention of Love, Arcadia and Six Degrees of Separation in the West End, and several seasons with the National and with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Lenska and Shelley are joined in the cast by Bernard Kay (Mr Birling), Timothy Watson (Gerald Croft), Kirsty Bushell (Sheila Birling), Ken Christiansen (Eric Birling) and Liz Daniels (Edna). An Inspector Calls is designed by Ian MacNeil, with lighting by Rick Fisher and music by Stephen Warbeck. It is presented on tour by PW Productions.
Following Woking, the tour continues to Newcastle, Edinburgh, Clwyd, Coventry, Norwich, Canterbury, Cheltenham, Manchester, Milton Keynes, High Wycombe and Jersey.
