Season 2012 AN INSPECTOR CALLS HTC Artspace Exhibition This year the Artspace celebrates the 60th Anniversary of the Heidelberg Theatre Company, featuring archival posters, programmes, photos and newspaper articles, mapping the history of the theatre and highlighting the wonderful plays presented over the years - as well as a display of interesting and beautiful costumes on the Mezzanine. The display, including costumes, for our first play this year has attracted great interest and comment The display for our second play of 2012 covers the third decade of the Company, the 1970s. These documents have been collected by various members of the theatre over many years and we thank them for being aware of the importance of preserving our history. We hope you enjoy the journey with us through the sixty memorable years of Heidelberg Theatre Company HEIDELBERG THEATRE COMPANY (HTC) BOOKINGS 03 9457 4117 ENQUIRIES 03 9455 3039 EMAIL [email protected] WEB www.htc.org.au HTC is a member of the Victorian Drama League. HTC acknowledges financial assistance from the City of Banyule. 2 HEIDELBERG THEATRE COMPANY 3 May - 193 May 2012 About the author J.B. Priestley was born in Bradford, in England’s industrial midlands. He left school at age sixteen to work for a local wool merchant, and in 1914 enlisted in the army. In his subsequent writing, Priestley often drew on his wartime experiences and memories of pre-war England. In 1919, Priestley spent three years at Cambridge, taking honours in English literature, modern history, and political science. As a fiction writer, he became a household name with ‘The Good Companions’ (1929), a comic novel about an itinerant group of music-hall entertainers that sold almost a million copies in hardcover. This was quickly followed by another successful novel, ‘Angel Pavement’ (1930). In 1931, Priestley collaborated on his first West End play, a dramatization of ‘The Good Companions’. Then came a series of original plays: thrillers (‘Dangerous Corner’, 1932), comedies (‘Laburnum Grove’, 1933), and nostalgic family dramas (‘Eden End’, 1934). Priestley averaged a play a year through the 1930s, some of which explored new ideas and forms. His “time plays” for instance, ‘Time and the Conways’ and ‘I Have Been Here Before’ (both 1937), were conventional in form but experimental in their subject – the “fourth dimension” of time. In 1932 he founded his own company, the English Players, and directed more than thirty plays in his career. In 1938 he even acted in a West End production of his own play ‘When We Are Married’, replacing a leading actor who had been injured in a motorcycle accident. During the war Priestley developed a new public role as a radio essayist, in which his common-sense views seemed emblematic of what was best in British middleclass values. In the 1940s and ’50s he continued to write new plays in a variety of genres, including the popular drama ‘An Inspector Calls’ (1945) and the family drama ‘The Glass Cage’ (1957), written for Canada’s Davis family whom Priestley met while visiting Toronto. In the 1960s and ’70s, while he continued to write in many forms, his best-known work was as a social historian, with such books as ‘The Edwardians’ (1970) and ‘The English’ (1973). A major chronicler of the twentieth century, Priestley wrote some 30 plays, 29 novels, and numerous collections of criticism, short stories, social history, reminiscences, and essays. His rich legacy of drama, fiction, and non-fiction continues to delight and provoke his audiences. 4 About the play Priestly wrote ‘An Inspector Calls’ in 1945 but set it in 1912, prior to World War I, “The Great War”. The play was first performed in Moscow, apparently due to a lack of a suitable theatre in in London in early post-World War II. It opened on August 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The English premiere was in Manchester on September 9, 1946, where it opened at the Opera House for a brief tryout before moving to the New Theatre in London on October 1, 1946. Highly successful after its first and subsequent London productions, the play is now considered one of Priestley’s greatest works, and has been subject to a variety of critical interpretations. A film version was released in 1954, starring Alastair Sim as Inspector Goole. After the new wave of social realist theatre in the 1950s and 1960s, the play fell out of fashion, and regarded by many as an out-dated “drawing room” drama. However, it continued to remain a staple of regional repertory theatre and, following several successful revivals including Stephen Daldry's production for Britain’s National Theatre, the play was “rediscovered” and hailed as an incisive social critique of capitalism and the hypocrisy and callousness of the well-to-do. Daldry’s production opened on September 11, 1992, and ran almost continuously at various London theatres for the next decade. The National’s production opened at the Royale Theatre in New York on April 27, 1994, where it ran for 454 performances and won several Tony awards, including Best Revival. The times of the play ‘An Inspector Calls’ is set in the Edwardian era, which corresponds to the reign of King Edward VII. Often referred to as England’s “golden age,” the era was a time of relative peace, being situated between the Boer War (1899 - 1902) and World War I. It was also a time of great technological advancements, with inventions like the radio, the airplane, the age of the great ocean liners, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It was a period of outstanding achievement in the arts (e.g. George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, silent movies, and Ragtime) as well as a time of intense political activity and social controversy. The wealthy lived extravagantly while the poor lacked many resources and were denied basic rights. This created vast disparity between the classes and the sexes. ‘An Inspector Calls’ deals with the tail end of the Edwardian period, characterized by much social unrest. The crisis of extreme poverty in the midst of towering wealth became impossible to ignore. It was a time of protests, factory strikes, and lockouts. Unemployment threatened the economy and rising interest in socialism threatened the capitalist system on which society rested. Attention was being paid to women’s suffrage issues and the plight of the poor. Women, the working class and their sympathizers found their voices and began the fight for social justice. 5 Players ARTHUR BIRLING Roderick Chappel GERALD CROFT Lyall Mabin SHEILA BIRLING Nicole Gregurek SYBIL BIRLING Linda Morgan EDNA Alice Fitzgerald ERIC BIRLING Anders William Ross INSPECTOR GOOLE Chris Gaffney Setting: The dining-room of the Birlings’ house in Brumley, an industrial city in the Midlands of England. An evening in Spring, 1912 The play is in three acts. Refreshments are available in the interval following Act 1. There is a brief interval after Act 2; no refreshments will be served. This play includes smoking and the use of a fog machine. Production Team DIRECTOR John Jenkins PRODUCTION COORDINATION Jim Thomson STAGE MANAGER Melanie Belcher STAGE ASSISTANTS Bobbie Parish, Dana Drage SET CONCEPT John Jenkins SET DESIGN Marie Mackrell ORIGINAL MUSIC Drew Lane WARDROBE Wendy Drowley PROPERTIES Bronwyn Parker, Dana Drage LIGHTING DESIGN Deryk Hartwick LIGHTING OPERATION Eugene Dolgikh SOUND DESIGN George Bissett SOUND OPERATION Christian Dell’Olio SET REALISATION Owen Evans, Marie Mackrell, Doug McNaughton, Dennis Pain, Paddy Moriarty, Des Harris, Neville Wilkie, Malcolm Cother, Sam Gilbert, Ian McCabe, Christian Dell’Olio & HTC Members PHOTOGRAPHY Patricia Tyler PROGRAMME & POSTER Chris McLean PUBLICITY Bruce Akers, Toni Tyers, Chris McLean BOX OFFICE Toni Tyers, June Cherrey, Linda Coutts, Jenni Purdey FRONT OF HOUSE Patricia Tyler and HTC members ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Drew Lane of Captivation Musicals Director: JOHN JENKINS John first appeared at Heidelberg Theatre Company in 2009 as Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's wonderfully absurdist play, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’. ‘The Business of Murder’ was his first directorial role here but he arrived with a wealth of theatre experience. Since beginning acting in his youth, John has played dozens of characters. Though claiming a preference for comedies this hasn't stopped John having the lead role in ‘The Crucible’ and ‘The Adman’ included in his résumé. He has appeared in musicals such as ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and TV and film roles also appear on his list. In 2004 John was a founding member of Shoestring Theatre down on the Mornington Peninsula. There he spent more time as director than actor, with credits for ‘Bedside Manner’, ‘Misery’, ‘Murdered to Death’, and ‘Secondary Cause of Death’. In 2010 John took on the role of Detective Baylen at the last minute for HTC’s ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ which won him the VDL award for best actor in a minor role. His directorial debut for Heidelberg, ‘The Business of Murder’ last year, introduced him to the amazing support crew this company provides. He also hopes they will invite him back next year. CHRIS GAFFNEY (Inspector Goole) Since 1978 Chris has appeared in Australian and British theatres in some 150 productions professional and amateur, including New Theatre, Greek theatre, Vic Arts, Melbourne Workers Theatre, Aust. Shakespeare Theatre, Gay theatre, La Mama, school tours, Keep Left Theatre and Melton Theatre, the latter two of which he founded. He has also appeared in numerous TV shows from ‘The Sullivans’ to ‘Neighbours’. Chris’ stage roles include Oscar Wilde in ‘Saint Oscar’’, Hector in ‘The History Boys’ and Roy in ‘Cosi’. He has made many short films and does two radio shows in opera and politics. Chris returns to Heidelberg Theatre after 30 years.