Oscar-nominated director Stephen Daldry is bringing his acclaimed adaption of JB Priestley's classic thriller An Inspector Calls to Blackpool Grand.

STEPHEN Daldry finds himself in a unique position amongst theatre directors.

Though best-known as the Oscar-nominated director of powerful screen dramas The Hours and The Reader, the show that made his name was JB Priestley’s thriller An Inspector Calls at the National Theatre in 1992.

But while the breakthrough stage productions of other directors live on only in photographs and audience memories, Daldry’s Inspector is heading confidently towards its 17th birthday, and its latest UK tour brings it to Blackpool’s Grand Theatre from Tuesday, March 10 to Saturday, March 14.

When it opened at the National’s Lyttelton auditorium it won ecstatic reviews, went on to win three Olivier Awards and later triumphed on Broadway.

Royalties from the New York run and the US regional tour that followed made Daldry a wealthy man, and his fortune swelled as the Inspector returned to London’s West End, taking up residence for more than five years at the Garrick Theatre, from 1995–2001.

Add in several more UK tours and it has now played more than 4,750 performances worldwide — making it by a clear margin the most successful revival of a play in British history.

When we bring this record to Daldry’s attention, he gasps down the phone line from New York: “That’s amazing! I didn’t know that and I can’t quite believe it.

"It’s funny to be seeing a play that I first did at York when I was 29, and now I’m nearly 49. So you’re looking at work you did as a young man.”

Back in 1992 Daldry transformed critics’ and audiences’ attitudes towards Priestley’s 1945 play, which had invariably been given ‘safe’, realistic treatment in countless regional theatres, where it had enjoyed enduring popularity.

It is the story of the mysterious Inspector Goole, who calls on the Birling family in a Midlands town one evening in 1912 to investigate the death of Eva Smith, a young factory worker–turned–dress-shop assistant, and gradually exposes how middle-aged Mr Birling, a self-satisfied industrialist, his wife, son, daughter and daughter’s fiancé were all, to varying degrees, responsible for the young woman’s sacking, pregnancy and suicide.

Daldry and his colleagues made the Birlings’ home an out-of-scale mansion on stilts, brought most of the action out of doors, down to the front of the stage.

Outside the house it appears to be 1945, not 1912 and the speaking characters are sometimes surrounded by extras representing the needy population of post-war Britain.

Add in music and lighting that would not be out of place in a 1940s Hollywood detective thriller.

The Inspector’s touring cast have been rehearsed by Julian Webber, Daldry’s longtime, trusted associate director; Daldry himself has spent most of the last few months in New York, where last autumn he was simultaneously completing The Reader, for its release in American cinemas on December 10, and preparing for the Broadway opening on November 13 of Billy Elliot the Musical, the stage version of Lee Hall’s screenplay about the miner’s son who discovers ballet, which as Billy Elliot (2000) was Daldry’s award-winning debut as a feature film director.

These tight deadlines obliged him to perform a “wonderful juggling act during one of the most extraordinary periods of my life.”

His days started early. “I was getting up between five and six each morning and worked in the Reader edit room, which I had moved very close to the Imperial Theatre, where Billy was rehearsing, usually from 6.30am ’til lunchtime.”

While Daldry toiled on the very complex triple process of picture, sound and dialogue editing, the children in the Billy cast were attending lessons at the special private schoolroom set up by the producers.

“Then I’d rehearse in the theatre in the afternoon, nip back to the edit room while the cast and crew were on their tea break, then back to the theatre for evening rehearsals and into the preview performances.

"You’ve got around 200 people in the theatre, and just up the road about 80 working on finishing the film.

"It was rather wonderful having two very different families, if you like, all working incredibly hard. We all did get together sometimes, and the film crew came to watch Billy.

"The only real casualty of the whole period was not being able to take my kids to school.”

(He and his wife have daughters aged five and four).

  • An Inspector Calls is at Blackpool’s Grand Theatre from March 10 to 14. Call box office on 01253 290190.