How the National must have wanted lightning to strike twice. In a landmark 1992 production of An Inspector Calls, bright young director Stephen Daldry single-handedly wrenched playwright JB Priestley out of his dusty resting place in provincial rep and spun him into box-office gold.

Rupert Goold, who has lately worked such innovative magic on the likes of Macbeth and Six Characters In Search Of An Author, makes a long-anticipated South Bank debut with another Priestley drama, yet surprisingly fails to light many of his trademark fireworks.

Priestley, a stirring if not exactly subtle writer, meticulously charts the beginning, the end and the beginning of the end of the aspirations of the eponymous mother and six adult children, in a three-act structure that hops about between 1919 and 1938.

With his acute social conscience, Priestley was never going to allow time to be kind to the sort of people who are casually condescending to everyone not lucky enough to be cossetted by their levels of wealth and comfort.

Thus we witness, Conway by Conway, the ruthless dashing of youthful hopes and quenching of young ardour, and spot on the horizon a low-flying
allegory of England herself in the inter-war period.

Goold leads us through this time-
travelling super-abundance of broken dreams with care and skill, allowing the production an occasional ill-advised foray into melodrama, as well as the Celia Johnson school of bygone acting styles. Nonetheless, it’s standard stuff that any one of a number of directors, rather than this special talent, could have overseen.

We wait eagerly for defining Gooldian moments, and get them eventually at the end of the second and third acts, via some unusual live-action and video imagery. By this point, though, fleeting splashes of innovation seem oddly tacked on to such steadfast conventionality and merely reiterate points that Priestley himself has already hammered home.

Some fine acting sustains the evening. Francesca Annis pitches it perfectly as the conceited, slightly foolish matriarch. Hattie Morahan has a wonderful line in strained nerves as Kay, the aspiring novelist-turned-cynical journalist who serves as the mouthpiece for Priestley’s pet ideas about time and precognition.

Although it’s a clunking plot expedience that attractive Hazel (Lydia Leonard) ends up with unrefined industrialist Ernest Beevers, more allure in the role from Adrian Scarborough might have boosted credulity levels. I’ll wager that it will be some time before Priestley calls into the National again.
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