J B Priestley classic An Inspector Calls head to the Bradford Alhambra

This week, though, arriving at the Alhambra is a piece of theatre that is in some ways just as impressive. With 19 major awards and five million theatregoers on its own scoreboard is the National Theatre’s 1992 production of An Inspector Calls.

Directed by Stephen Daldry it really is a significant, impressive and hefty piece of theatre. If you like your work emotionally and intellectually engaging, you want to get along to the Alhambra for this piece – it also looks truly spectacular.

There is, of course, the added excitement whenever this production comes to Bradford (this isn’t the first time around – it’s the longest running revival of a play in history) because it’s a homecoming for author JB Priestley, whose statue stands and looks across the city centre just over the road from the theatre where his play will be watched, once again, by thousands. Bradfordian Priestley, born, raised and schooled in Manningham, saw his 1946 morality play become a hit in the West End and then a classic of British theatre.

What’s always particularly remarkable about this production of this piece is that it makes absolutely no bones about its leftist politics, nor that the play is a coruscating attack on the hypocrisy of Victorian society and an expression of Priestley’s socialist principles, and yet it looks like the kind of big classic production that would appeal to those who might pronounce what Priestley does as “thee-ayt-ar”. It makes it one of the most revolutionary pieces of theatre an audience might see.

One night the upper-class Birling family, in the Priestley play, are enjoying a night in their comfortable home and comfortable lives, when Inspector Goole comes calling and questions each member of the family about their connection to young working class woman who has committed suicide. The inference of blame is placed at each member of the Birling clan.

George Rowlands plays Eric Birling, a particularly heinous member of the family. “I read it at school, but I always think at school when you sit down and analyse every single word it can make you go a bit crazy, and I always thought it ruined books and plays. But now that I’m an adult, or more importantly now that I’m an actor, I definitely have more of an appreciation for it,” he says.

“At the end of the day, at its centre it’s a play about somebody in distress, and that doesn’t get old, does it? I think at different points in time when we’ve put it on over the last 30 years, it’s been relevant. And this time around I think it’s more relevant than ever because of what’s going on in terms of the strike action and housing crisis.”

It is impressive that a Bradfordian writing a piece of work in post Second World War Britain managed to capture something so intensely precise about our society that it continues to resonate down the ages.

As Rowlands says, strike action and the housing crisis might be the subject he sees as the lightning rods this play seems to hit today, but the truth is – and the reason it has been such a success since its award-winning National Theatre Premiere three decades ago – is because really it’s a play about man’s inhumanity to man.

Over the course of the evening of the interval-less production, each Birling family member has the finger of accusation levelled at them by Inspector Goole, including the character George Rowlands plays.

“Eric is well educated because he’s been sent to public school. He enjoys a drink, probably a little bit too much. The third fact is that Eric really wants to be respected by, namely his dad,” he says. “Unfortunately, the combination of those three facts results in some pretty catastrophic things.”

If you’ve seen the critically acclaimed Succession the above might ring a bell – he could just as easily be describing a Logan Roy offspring.

It’s easy to see that Priestley was tapping into something base in our nature and something that would continue to inspire writers decades later.

At Bradford Alhambra until May 13. bradford-theatres.co.uk