Stephen Daldry made his reputation in the theatre with thrilling rediscoveries of neglected plays and cemented it with his production of An Inspector Calls at the National Theatre in 1992.

Now, having earned international renown with films such as Billy Elliot and The Hours, he revisits that early expressionist coup.

At the start of JB Priestley’s period thriller, set in 1912, parvenu industrialist Arthur Birling is celebrating his daughter Sheila’s engagement.

A man who claims to be a policeman interrupts the party. He is ominously named Inspector Goole, and proceeds systematically to expose the turpitude of each guest before flitting off into the night.

The action is neatly constructed, but Daldry’s feat is to reclaim Priestley as an experimental artist. He reimagines the play as a darkly psychological drama complete with brooding string music and sepulchral woodwind.

The design, by Ian MacNeil, is the production’s star turn. The action centres on the Birlings’ Edwardian home, perched above a cobbled wasteland fogged with gouts of rain. At first it resembles a Gothic eyrie. Then its dinky doll’s house innards are revealed, before it symbolically collapses as the family’s honour implodes.

Yet the atmospheric bravura cannot obscure the inherent implausibility of Priestley’s play. Why do the Birlings accept the Inspector’s intrusion? His manner simply isn’t consistent with his status and professional protocols.

Nicholas Woodeson, in a suit he appears to have borrowed from a much larger man, is an appropriately beady-eyed Inspector. But he is mostly too self‑effacing — and then briefly stentorian, thundering out his moralistic criticism.

Around him there are performances that are enjoyable yet far from subtle. David Roper’s blunderous Arthur Birling appears to be a graduate of the John Prescott school of charm, while his wife (Sandra Duncan), once she lets her façade of hauteur drop, resembles a choleric dragon.

Marianne Oldham brings first archness and then a fine pathos to the role of Sheila. Timothy Watson is vulpine and creepy as her fiancé, while Robin Whiting as her brother metamorphoses from goofy fop into mewling cipher.

Crucially, Daldry has accentuated the political flavour of their discomfiture. The Inspector’s sermonising insistence that “we are responsible for each other” is clearly meant to poke criticism not at the class divisions of 1912, but at the solipsism of today. In 1992 it was a prescient dig at John Major’s “back to basics” campaign; now it feels like a jab at a society blind drunk on material comfort.

The real achievement of Daldry is to make something Wagnerian out of a play that is usually conceived in the idiom of Agatha Christie. It’s tempting to think of him as an alchemist, an instinctive master of how to fuse story and spectacle.

Here, in truth, the fusion isn’t perfect. Amid the operatic stylings some of Priestley’s original simple power is lost, and there is not quite enough breathing space for our own moral judgment. The production is entertaining but in the end a little too elaborately packaged.

Until 14 November. Information: 0844 482 5170.