IF YOU missed Stephen Daldry’s now celebrated production of JB Priestley’s thriller in the milktooth days of its York Theatre Royal debut in 1989, here is your chance to make amends, 20 years and 4,500 West End performances later.

Daldry is busy overseeing Billy Elliot The Musical on Broadway, and so this touring realisation of his re-awakening of Priestley’s socialist uprising is in the safe hands of resident director Adam Lenson. Ian MacNeil’s set design is still present and extraordinary: an over-sized doll’s house set on stilts to raise its smug, partying Edwardian occupants for moral examination by Priestley, the inspector and the audience alike, following the suicide of a young, discarded factory girl.

Inside, it is 1912; outside it is 1945 as urchins play in the wartime streets in the year when Priestley wrote his play.

A pillar-box telephone and steam radio denote the latter era, as does the Bogart raincoat of Louis Hilyer’s Inspector Goole (Goole by name, ghoul or spectre by implication).

The dinner jackets of bumptious former Lord Mayor Arthur Birling (David Roper) and the Edwardian finery of haughty Sybil Birling (Sandra Duncan, part Hyacinth Bucket, part Lady Bracknell) denote puffed-up earlier times.

While Goole’s tongue-loosening style of questioning keeps the conventional thriller boiling, Daldry’s German expressionist interpretation goes to work on a more political ticket.

In 1989, his wish was to send Margaret Thatcher’s Tory philosophies to the grave, to damn the pursuit of individual gain; in 2009, Inspector Goole’s final speech chimes with our age of risible Parliamentary expense claims and a renewed wish for both collective responsibility and someone, anyone, willing to say the hardest word: sorry.

You too will be sorry if you miss the inspector calling again: another 20 years would be a long time to wait.

* An Inspector Calls, Leeds Grand Theatre, until Saturday. Box office: 0844 848 2700.