Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy sift through the past in Stephen Daldry’s deluxe revival of David Hare’s 1995 drama “Skylight”

The last time Bill Nighy displayed his rangy yet precision-tooled physicality, his world-weary vocal and facial expressivity and his needling intellect on Broadway was in 2006 in “The Vertical Hour.” In that otherwise disappointing follow-up to “Stuff Happens,” playwright David Hare continued his reflection on the personal and political consequences of war, albeit with less incisiveness. It’s a pleasure to have the British actor back, and in top form, in the far superior 1995 Hare play “Skylight,” which also to some degree is about individual versus collective responsibility. Directed with probing clarity by Stephen Daldry, the beautifully acted revival pits Nighy against an equally compelling Carey Mulligan. The excellence of the production — which transfers intact from London and also includes Matthew Beard (“The Imitation Game”) in the small but essential role of the anxious 18-year-old son of Nighy’s well-heeled restaurateur — goes a long way toward finding balance in the play. While it has a terrific first act, “Skylight” ultimately works better as a complex relationship postmortem than as an issues debate about class, privilege and social conscience in a country of chasmic income inequality. But even when Hare stops inferring his point and starts using his characters as mouthpieces, this is riveting stuff, its commentary on the wealth divide as relevant now as it was then.