The Wife and I recently had the opportunity to see the Tony award winning production of the play An Inspector Calls. We saw it where it is presently playing at the magnificent Wallis Annenberg Theater in Beverly Hills. Presumably, it is also playing elsewhere around the country.
The play is about a mysterious, if not supernatural, inspector who, one night out of the blue in 1912, interrupts a wealthy family’s dinner party to tell them of a young woman’s suicide supposedly earlier that evening. What’s that to do with them, members of the family ask? One by one, they all find out . . . as their respective shattering, dark secrets are revealed.
If you have the opportunity, this play is a must see: Wonderful acting, great mystery and suspense, tremendous, highly clever, engaging and biting social commentary as timely today as when it was first written in 1945.
It was so impressive to me that, on returning home, I immediately went to Amazon to find and purchase the book or the screenplay. The original 1940s version is apparently no longer available, at least not readily so, but there is a 2018 graphic comic book version available in color ebook format, a format previously unfamiliar to me. I downloaded it and read it in less than an hour, to which the play was remarkably true.
I can’t say I’m likely to become a fan of graphic comic books, but this was a one time fascinating reading experience and supplement to the just seen play. Usually, I say “read the book and then see the movie (or in this case the play).” (I think there was a movie made in 2015.) In this instance, however, the opposite is true. The written form allows you to quickly enhance in greater depth and appreciation what one has to grasp on the fly in the play.
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