An Inspector Calls 9781474233637, 9781474233668, 9781474233644

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD
CHAPTER ONE The Play
Overview
Context
Themes
Characters
Dramatic technique
Critical reception and writings
Related work
Glossary of dramatic terms
CHAPTER TWO Behind The Scenes
Stephen Daldry (director)
Mary Papadima (director)
CHAPTER THREE Writing About the Play
Developing your own response
Constructing an argument
Showing knowledge and understanding of the play
Making connections between the text and its contexts
Writing about character
Analysing a short extract
Writing in an appropriate style
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

An Inspector Calls GCSE Student Guide

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Methuen Drama publications for GCSE students Available and forthcoming GCSE Student Editions Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers Simon Stephens’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Charlotte Keatley’s My Mother Said I Never Should Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey

GCSE Student Guides Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers by Ros Merkin Simon Stephens’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Jacqueline Bolton Dennis Kelly’s DNA by Maggie Inchley Alan Bennett’s The History Boys by Steve Nicholson J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls by Philip Roberts R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End by Andrew Maunder Charlotte Keatley’s My Mother Said I Never Should by Sophie Bush Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey by Kate Whittaker

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An Inspector Calls GCSE Student Guide PHILIP ROBERTS Series Editor: Jenny Stevens

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Methuen Drama 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc © Philip Roberts 2016 Foreword © Stephen Daldry 2016 Philip Roberts has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN :

PB : ePDF : epub:

978-1-4742-3363-7 978-1-4742-3364-4 978-1-4742-3365-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: GCSE Student Guides Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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For Tilly and Jude

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements viii Foreword by Stephen Daldry ix

1 The Play

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Overview 1 Context 6 Themes 21 Characters 27 Dramatic technique 43 Critical reception and writings 57 Related work 66 Glossary of dramatic terms 71

2 Behind the Scenes

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Stephen Daldry (director) 75 Mary Papadima (director) 81

3 Writing About the Play

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Select Bibliography 97 Index 99

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Tom Priestley, President of the J. B. Priestley Society; to the Officers of the Society – Lee Hanson, Chairman; Nicolas Hawkes, Vice-Chairman; and Michael Nelson, Information Officer. My thanks to Alison Cullingford, Keeper of Special Collections, J. B. Priestley University Library, University of Bradford, and Martin Levy, Special Collections Assistant. To Marieke Spencer of Working Title Film Productions, and Nicki Stoddart of United Agents LLP. To Stephen Daldry for the Foreword, together with Mary Papadima, Associate Director, the Theatre by the Lake, Keswick. Finally, I am very much obliged to Anna Brewer, Senior Commissioning Editor, Methuen Drama, and to Jenny Stevens, Series Editor.

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FOREWORD When Derek Nicholls, who ran the Theatre Royal at York, asked me in 1989 to direct Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, I had great trouble trying to persuade myself that this staple of amateur dramatic groups was of any interest. Two facts changed my mind. Understanding that Priestley had written it just before the 1945 General Election as a ‘call to arms’ excited me politically. In 1989, when the play appeared at York, Margaret Thatcher [the Prime Minister] was talking of a return to ‘Edwardian values’, and arguing that there was ‘no such thing as society’. For me, the play was more in line with the ‘agitation and propaganda’ [known as agitprop] theatre of the eighties than an ‘old war horse’ for local repertory theatres. The second fact was that the original production in Russia had not been set in a naturalistic drawing room. The production’s designer, Ian MacNeil, and I spent one long summer researching everything we could find on Priestley as a political agitator and trying to discover ways of releasing the play from the shackles of a box set. We wanted the play to talk of the ‘Edwardian values’ Thatcher was keen for us all to follow; to allow the 1945 election to be present in the production; and, most importantly, to find a theatrical language that would allow the characters to speak directly to the audience in 1989. Priestley’s own moral socialism and his fascination with theories about the circularity of time were our justification. We were essentially trying to give Priestley a production which supported his claim to be a ‘radical and experimental’ writer. Derek was an enthusiastic supporter, and embraced all of our ideas, including a silent chorus of as many people as possible to represent the neglected millions. This was the decade of cuts ix

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to the arts, and a funding crisis. Derek accordingly needed a box office hit. Despite our worry that the audience might reject a production of this kind, the York audience proved hungry for Priestley’s moral questioning. Two years later, Richard Eyre, Artistic Director of the National Theatre, asked me to direct a play there. Having explored some new ideas in the York production, but believing we had still further to go, I suggested An Inspector Calls. Richard was very nervous about the National producing such a tired old stand-by, but was eventually persuaded after the Head of Touring, Roger Chapman, felt it would be a good choice for a regional tour. Knowing this new production would attract a great deal of controversy, I went to see Jacquetta Hawkes, Priestley’s wonderful and brilliant widow, to explain in great detail what I was proposing, and hopefully get her blessing. I tried to persuade her that the use of irony, the grotesque, incredibly loud underscore, and a set that literally would fall down, was all in keeping with Priestley’s original spirit as a radical theatre writer. She gave me enough of her blessing to continue, and was amused after she came to see the production: ‘I didn’t think you would actually do anything you proposed.’ I am writing this in September, 2015. An Inspector Calls has just started a run at the Orchard Theatre, Dartford, at the beginning of another national tour. A migration crisis has overwhelmed the European Union, and the appalling image of the toddler, Aylan Kurdi, washed up dead on a beach in Turkey, has moved us all to ask who is responsible. Last night on stage, the Inspector came forward with the warning that unless things change, all will be engulfed in ‘fire and blood and anguish’. I was sorely tempted to add Aylan Kurdi’s name to his speech . . . ‘One Eva Smith has gone-but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, and what we think and say and do . . .’.

FOREWORD

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Even without using his name, the audience knew exactly what Priestley was talking about. Agitation and propaganda indeed. Stephen Daldry, 2015

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CHAPTER ONE

The Play Overview The dinner party Five people are finishing dinner. They are wearing evening dress, and are sitting around a large dining room table. A parlour maid clears the table of dessert plates, and wine glasses. The five are Arthur and Sybil Birling, both in their fifties, their children, Sheila and Eric, early twenties, together with a guest, Gerald Croft, about thirty. The occasion is to celebrate the engagement of Sheila to Gerald. A happy occasion is slightly modified by the opening stage directions, and descriptions of the characters. The room is ‘not cosy and homelike’. Arthur Birling is ‘a heavy-looking, rather portentous man’. His wife is ‘a rather cold woman’. While Sheila and Gerald are, respectively, ‘very pleased with life’ and ‘an attractive chap’, Eric is ‘not quite at ease’. What appears to be is not always what is. The conversation is centred on the engagement. As well as making Sheila very happy, it pleases Arthur greatly, for such a connection offers him potential entry to upper-class society via Gerald’s family. He hints he may be in line for a knighthood. He then makes an after-dinner speech to Eric and Gerald. The speech dismisses the possibility of war: ‘And I’m talking as a hard-headed, practical man of business. And I say there isn’t a 1

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chance of war.’ His reference to the Titanic places the play in the spring of 1912. Birling’s speech is vital for the development of the play. He describes the world as it will be, ‘let’s say, in 1940’, ignorant of what 1940 will bring. Birling’s complacency is allied to his resistance to ideas of community ‘and all that nonsense’. His world is about to be shattered.

Inspector Goole and Arthur Birling As Sybil, Sheila and Eric leave the room for coffee, the parlourmaid announces the arrival of Inspector Goole. The ‘pink and intimate’ lighting gives way to ‘brighter and harder’ lighting. The Inspector changes the room by his presence, and by his announcement that a young woman, called Eva Smith, had died in hospital after swallowing disinfectant. He had been to her room and discovered a letter, a diary and a photograph. Goole concentrates on Birling as her former employer. He shows the photograph only to Birling, to the irritation of both Eric and Gerald. And Birling does remember that he dismissed Eva nearly two years ago after she, on behalf of a group of young women, asked for a pay rise. He denies any responsibility for her death: ‘If we were all responsible for everything that happened to everybody we’d had anything to do with, it would be very awkward, wouldn’t it?’ Birling huffs and puffs, his self-importance undermined by Goole’s insistence on conducting the investigation as he determines.

Goole, Sheila, and Gerald Sheila is the next one to be interrogated. After being dismissed by Birling, Eva found employment in a clothes shop. But she was dismissed after a few months when a customer complained about her. Shown the photograph, Sheila runs sobbing from the room. And returns to confess her part in Eva’s tragedy. Her bad mood, a sight of Eva smiling, and a complaint, leading in part to a suicide.

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Goole moves massively and single-mindedly from one to another of the members of the dinner party. Who is he? Is he really an Inspector? Is his name another spelling for ‘Ghoul’? There are no answers, but he continues to ask questions in his own way. And Sheila begins to grasp the truth, which is that Goole, whoever or whatever he is, will do things his way, and not be deflected by power, authority or bluster. She then finds that Gerald had an affair with Eva, who had changed her name to Daisy Renton.* The man about town enjoying himself. Inevitably, Sybil Birling on her entry assumes her usual imperious pose to put Goole down. She is made to wait while the Inspector questions Gerald. Goole’s sequence of inquiry may not be altered. Gerald’s honesty in front of Sheila redeems him somewhat, as he leaves the house to go for a walk. Which leaves Sybil and Eric to complete Goole’s list.

Goole, Sybil, and Eric Sybil denies that she recognizes the photograph of Eva. She is immediately accused by Sheila of evasion. She is made to admit that she saw Eva two weeks ago, when she chaired a meeting of the Brumley Women’s Charity Organization. And rejected an appeal from Eva for help. Mrs Birling was, she says, astonished that Daisy said her name was Birling. The ‘impertinence’ prejudiced her against the application. Later, Eva’s reason becomes clear. Goole, his contempt barely disguised, reveals that the dead girl had been pregnant. Eva had told Sybil Birling that the dead child’s father was ‘only a youngster – silly and wild and drinking too much’. Sybil insists that the father should accept responsibility. As Act Two draws to a close, it dawns on Sheila, and then on the others, that the ‘silly and wild’ youngster is Eric, who then enters ‘looking extremely pale and distressed’. The Act ends.

* To avoid confusion, Eva remains Eva in this Guide.

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Goole and Eric The Inspector listens to Eric’s story. Eric encountered Eva in a bar, and ended up at Eva’s lodgings. He can’t remember making love, but gave her money on subsequent occasions. A lot of his earlier behaviour begins to be explained. The money he gave Eva was stolen from his father’s office. By now, a climax is close, as Eric indicts his parents, particularly his mother, for her terrible cruelty and vindictiveness. The Inspector delivers his judgement.

The judgement The bickering family is brought to silence as the Inspector condemns them, some more than others: ‘This girl killed herself – and died a horrible death. But each of you helped to kill her. Remember that. Never forget it.’ He makes his final speech, a powerful appeal for community and mutual responsibility: ‘And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.’ And the Inspector leaves as mysteriously as he appeared. The play has travelled from the self-satisfaction, and the self-absorption of the family, to a plea and a warning of where that attitude will leave people.

The aftermath The family is left accusing each other. Sheila and Eric are ready to learn from the events. Their parents are dismayed at the threat to their status and well-being. It is Sheila who poses the question as to the identity of the Inspector. This matters profoundly to Birling. If Goole was not a real inspector, there will be no repercussions. It is left to Sheila, who has become the family conscience, to point out that her parents are interested only in maintaining the status quo, rather than be affected by the truths of the evening. Then

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Gerald arrives from his walk, and announces that Goole wasn’t a police officer. Birling phones the Chief Constable, who confirms that he has no one of that description on his staff. The huge relief of Birling, Sybil and Gerald is palpable. As they relax into self-righteousness, it is Eric who reminds them of what the family has done. He is supported by Sheila. Gerald queries whether the girl who died was in fact Eva. The Inspector might have shown members of the family different photographs. Gerald, Birling and Sybil all work to discredit the Inspector. Gerald telephones the hospital and establishes that no young woman has died there in the evening. Triumphantly, they act as if it were all a bad dream, apart from Sheila and Eric. But the play ends with Birling taking a telephone call from the police: ‘A girl has just died – on her way to the Infirmary – after swallowing some disinfectant. And a police inspector is on his way here to ask some questions.’ The mystery deepens.

Things to do

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esearch online to find the answers to the following:

1 Why is there no cloth on the Birlings’ dining room table? 2 What does a 1912 telephone look like? Were they expensive? 3 What were a parlour-maid’s duties at the time in which the play is set? 4 What is the meaning of ‘squiffy’; ‘Steady the Buffs’? What would be the modern-day equivalents? 5 What is a tantalus? 6 When did golf arrive in England? How does Priestley use the idea of golf?

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Context Before the War Birling . . . you can ignore all this silly pessimistic talk. When you marry, you’ll be marrying at a very good time. Yes, a very good time – and soon it’ll be an even better time. Last month, just because the miners came out on strike, there’s a lot of wild talk about possible labour trouble in the near future. Don’t worry. We’ve passed the worst of it. We employers at last are coming together to see that our interests – and the interests of Capital – are properly protected. And we’re in for a time of steadily increasing prosperity. Gerald I believe you’re right, sir. Eric What about war? Birling Glad you mentioned it, Eric. I’m coming to that. Just because the Kaiser makes a speech or two, or a few German officers have too much to drink and begin talking nonsense, you’ll hear some people say that war’s inevitable. And to that I say – fiddlesticks! The Germans don’t want war. Nobody wants war, except some half-civilized folks in the Balkans. And why? There’s too much at stake these days. Everything to lose and nothing to gain by war . . . The world’s developing so fast that it’ll make war impossible. Look at the progress we’re making. In a year or two we’ll have aeroplanes that will be able to go anywhere. And look at the way the auto-mobile’s making headway – bigger and faster all the time. And then ships. Why, a friend of mine went over this new liner last week – the Titanic – she sails next week – forty-six thousand eight hundred tons – fortysix thousand eight hundred tons – New York in five days – and every luxury – and unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable. That’s what you’ve got to keep your eye on, facts like that,

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progress like that – and not a few German officers talking nonsense and a few scaremongers here making a fuss about nothing. Now you three young people, just listen to this – and remember what I’m telling you now. In twenty or thirty years’ time – let’s say, in 1940 – you may be giving a little party like this – your son or daughter might be getting engaged – and I tell you, by that time you’ll be living in a world that’ll have forgotten all these Capital versus Labour agitations and all these silly little war scares. There’ll be peace and prosperity and rapid progress everywhere – except of course in Russia, which will always be behindhand, naturally . . . We can’t let these Bernard Shaws and H.G.Wellses do all the talking. We hardheaded practical businessmen must say something sometime. In the extract above, Birling speaks as a wealthy middle-class Edwardian businessman. His speech is one of the most important in the play. It comes very early on, and affects profoundly how the audience views him and what he says. He is representative of his peers. His opinions are commonplace within his stratum of society.

The times The Edwardian period covers the early years of the twentieth century. It takes its name from the presiding king, Edward VII , but continued after his death in 1910, and ran up to the First World War, and beyond. Birling and his family are successful and well off. For middle-class families, life was pleasant. But the social divide was acute. A rigid class structure, the upper, middle and lower, ensured the privilege of the few and the disadvantage of the majority. Birling points to an age of great prosperity and achievement. He is right. Britain during this time led the world in trade, and London was the financial centre of trading activity. The Empire was so vast that one in three of the world’s population were its subjects. Technology

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advanced rapidly. The world’s mightiest ocean liner, appropriately named the Titanic, sailed the week after his speech. National confidence was infectious – for those who could afford the time.

The Titanic The ocean-going liner was the largest and most luxurious ship ever built. It was modelled on the interiors of the Ritz Hotel, London, to satisfy the demands of rich, mostly American, tourists. On board were a gym, a pool, a Turkish bath, kennels (for first class dogs), a squash court, suites for the very wealthy, and its own newspaper. There were 20,000 bottles of beer, 1,500 bottles of wine and 8,000 cigars – all for first class passengers. Its Grand Staircase descended seven of the ship’s ten decks. The Titanic had three levels of accommodation: First Class, some with suites containing private dining rooms, and living room areas, together with accommodation for maids and valets. Second Class was for those who had achieved a measure of success from work – miners, teachers, clerks. Third Class consisted mostly of emigrants to North America. A perfect mirror of the structure of Edwardian society. The ship sailed from Southampton on 15 April 1912. Towards mid-day, a lookout sighted an iceberg, 100 feet tall, which collided with Titanic 37 seconds later. The ship sank at 2.20am. About 1,500 people died. Only 306 bodies were found. The liner which Arthur Birling boasts of vanished. Priestley himself referred to the labelling of the ship as symbolic of the period: ‘The peculiar hubris* that had created the fatal Titanic legend vanished from the scene. There was to be no more defiant bragging for a long, long time’.

* hubris – Greek for insolent pride.

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Politics and change The call for a more equitable society found expression in the creation of the Fabian Movement in 1884. It mainly consisted of middle-class intellectuals, including writers such as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf. It became the pre-eminent academic society of the Edwardian era. The Fabians advocated Socialism which argues the empowerment of the workers in a society, so that the entire community owns and controls the means of production and distribution. It is fundamentally hostile to Capitalism, a political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. The Fabian Movement laid the foundations of what became the Labour Party. Despite Birling’s scorn, events would soon move beyond the control of figures such as him. In the General Election of 1906, Labour increased its number of MP s to thirty. Politics began to change.

The miners And yet . . . this period saw increasing levels of revolt about the status quo by those who felt disadvantaged by the existing structures of Edwardian society. Birling in his speech, for example, dismisses the strike of the miners for the minimum wage, which began in March 1912, as of no importance. The miners had during the nineteenth century agitated steadily for improvements to their working conditions. The mine owners had resisted. The miners had attempted to form unions, largely unsuccessfully. But 1911 saw the nation crippled – when dockworkers, miners and railway men brought the country to its knees. Birling is almost comically confident that the unrest can be contained. Because the notion of organized labour is novel to him, he feels safe in waving it away. Yet between 1900 and 1913, Trade Union membership grew from two to over four million. Priestley, himself an Edwardian, wrote about the crisis: ‘This was a time running to extremes. The “diehard”

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employers and managers felt that if they gave way to any demand for a shilling or two more in the weekly pay packet they would be encouraging revolution itself, the very ground opening under their feet.’ Figures such as Birling and his fellow owners were to see the massive growth of the unions, and the legitimate representation of the working class. But not yet.

Women and women’s rights As well as the miners’ struggle, the period saw the intensification of the struggle for the rights of women. Women were accorded a clear role. Middle-class women, such as Sybil Birling, managed the house and the servants, and were involved in charitable work. Working-class women found work as domestic servants, or in manufacturing industry. By 1899, over half a million women worked in factories. From the middle of the nineteenth century, many upper and middle-class women argued for ‘universal suffrage’.* The lack of progress in Britain saw Emmeline Pankhurst create, in 1903, the Women’s Social and Political Union. The group became known as the Suffragettes. It became militant, and its activities included smashing shop windows in Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street and Oxford Street. From small beginnings, the revolt became a war. Over two hundred women were arrested and sent to prison, where some were force fed. Public opinion was divided, but the advent of the war saw many women working in the factories replacing the men who had gone to fight. In 1918, occupiers of property, or women over thirty married to occupiers, were granted the right to vote. There was still a long way to go.

Rumblings of war Birling dismisses the ruler of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II , as just a speechmaker. People in the Balkans are half-civilized, and Russia is a nation which is always behind other nations.

* Suffrage – the right of women to vote and to stand for electoral office.

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The Kaiser, whose grandmother was Queen Victoria, supported the expansion of German military might, particularly the navy. Half-civilized or not, the countries which made up the Balkans fought two wars against the Ottoman Empire in 1912 and 1913, and these became a prelude to the First World War. In June 1914, the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist. This may have seemed remote to most Britons, but the ensuing conflict between the Austro-Hungarian government and Serbia drew in the major European powers. By the beginning of August, Britain was at war with Germany. And by the end of the war, a revolution in Russia led ultimately to the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, one of the world’s great powers.

After two wars The audience in Moscow, where the play was first presented in 1945, or the first London audience of 1946, would have reacted to Birling’s speech with despair and anger. Both Russian and British audiences were survivors of a war which killed over sixty million people. Some of them would also have been involved in the First World War, only some twenty-one years earlier, which saw the slaughter of some thirty-seven million people. Just over a decade to slaughter over ninety seven million people.

The times–1945 This is how one of today’s historians describes post-war Britain: Britain in 1945. No supermarkets, no motorways, no teabags, no sliced bread, no frozen food, no flavoured crisps, no lager, no microwaves, no dishwashers, no Formica, no vinyl, no CD s, no computers, no mobiles, no duvets, no Pill, no

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trainers, no hoodies, no Starbucks. Four Indian restaurants. Shops on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street, red telephone boxes, Lyons Corner Houses, trams, trolley-buses, steam trains . . . No launderettes, no automatic washing machines, wash day every Monday, clothes boiled in a tub, rinsed in the sink, put through a mangle, hung out to dry . . . Abortion illegal, homosexual relationships illegal, suicide illegal, capital punishment legal. White faces everywhere. Back-to-backs, narrow cobbled streets, Victorian terraces, no high-rises. Arterial roads, suburban semis, the march of the pylon. Austin Sevens, Ford Eights, no seat belts, Triumph motorcycles with sidecars . . . Meat rationed, butter rationed, lard rationed, sugar rationed, tea rationed, cheese rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, sweets rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed. Make do and mend. KYNASTON

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Politics and change The country had pulled together during the war, but the scars of the Great Depression of the 1930s remained, as did the National Debt. A war won, but at great cost. There was a growing belief that something better must emerge. The country must not return to the economics of mass unemployment, poverty and deprivation. The party regarded as being able to deliver a new vision was not the Conservatives, which was closely associated with the Depression, but Labour under Clement Attlee. Labour was part of the wartime coalition government, and had already begun planning for peace. In 1942, the Beveridge Report was published. An economist and civil servant, William Beveridge set out proposals for a comprehensive post-war system of social security, laying the foundations for a welfare state. He attacked the ‘five giant evils’ of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. In 1944, a White Paper committed the government to the pursuit of full employment as a prime objective. In the same year, the

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Education Act was placed on the statute book, which created free, non-fee-paying grammar schools. Labour’s manifesto stated that ‘The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it’. The manifesto listed, among other things, the nationalization of electricity, gas, coal, and transport; an urgent housing programme; and the creation of a new national health service. It is an extraordinary set of objectives, which is not blind to the fact that it is also massively expensive. Britain was in debt, and the huge financial strain of maintaining an empire was taking its toll. Yet, Attlee’s Labour Party at the General Election, polled nearly 48 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 72.6 per cent. Arthur Birling would have had a fit, for the core of the movement was to do with the care of everyone, and a belief in community. It must have seemed to many people, Priestley included, that Inspector Goole had finally won the argument.

The miners In 1945, as war ended, the government made it clear that it intended to nationalize the entire coal industry. The National Coal Board was created in 1946, and given the responsibility of managing and running the industry. Achieving this step had taken many years of struggle towards public ownership. Wages and conditions improved. Investment led to greater productivity, and miners were among the highest paid workers. However, the miners were without power, because the industry was run by the National Coal Board. The primary driver was profit, not community. And that lack led ultimately to the strikes of 1972, 1974 and, crucially, the great confrontation of 1984–5 [see below].

Women and women’s rights The pattern is familiar. As in the First World War, women played a vital role in the Second World War. The Women’s Land Army was re-formed in 1939 to replace men called for military service. By 1943, women were stopped from joining

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the armed forces, and given a choice of working on the land or in factories. The Women’s Voluntary Service had one million members by 1943, and became a basic resource: providing tea, refreshments, socks and balaclavas or collecting scrap metal. The members were nearly all elderly – younger women were working on the land or in the factories. Groups such as the Auxiliary Territorial Service and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force led more exciting lives. But only comparatively. They rarely saw direct action, because they were not thought suitable for front line service. No woman was allowed to train as a fighter pilot. The old male certainties remained. After war ended, women were expected to return home, both to provide job vacancies for returning men, and to resume familial duties. Yet something had changed. Women during the war earned their own money, assumed a certain independence, and began to resist assumptions, mainly by men, about their future role in post-1945 society. Still a good way to go.

Priestley’s wars Priestley wrote An Inspector Calls from his notes in a week during the winter of 1944–5. As he wrote, the war was ending. For the second time in his life, he watched the death and destruction consequent on nation states violently opposing each other. Like many figures who have experienced war, he rarely spoke of it. He was twenty when he enlisted, and twenty-five when he was demobbed. A good chunk of his early manhood was spent fighting. Not until he was sixty-eight was his Margin Released published, which contains some account of his experiences: ‘I do not think my professional life and work . . . can be understood without some account of these years of soldiering.’ Even from the distance of 1962, what happened haunted him: ‘I felt, as indeed I still feel today and must go on feeling until I die, the open wound, never to be healed of my generation’s fate, the best sorted out and then slaughtered, not by hard necessity but mainly by huge murderous public folly.’ The very complexity of that sentence is indicative of his anger

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and grief. For Priestley, and his generation, a world was lost: ‘And nobody, nothing, will shift me from the belief, which I shall take to the grave, that the generation to which I belong, destroyed between 1914 and 1918, was a great generation, marvellous in its promise. This is not self-praise, because those of us who are left know that we are the runts’ (Priestley 1962, 132–3). Extraordinary, then, that, rather than dissolve into grief and bitterness at what happened in his early life, he wrote a play which speaks of the danger of a fragmented society, and the necessity of change. If the Birlings of the world cannot alter, their children may. When the play was being written, Priestley would have known about the 1942 Beveridge Report, and the proposal for what became the Welfare State. It was therefore a huge effort of optimism to argue in the play for the possibility of massive change. He even stood as a parliamentary candidate in the General Election. Came third.

In your time Margaret Thatcher, 1979–1990 Before this century began, a series of political events combined to make the world you have inherited. A good starting point is the election in 1979 of the first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. A person of fixed principle and profound self-belief, she embarked on a series of measures designed, as she saw it, to control some sections of society, and liberate others. High unemployment must be reduced, and a recession attended to. Deregulation [the relaxing of government controls] was a necessity, especially as regards the financial sector. She wanted a flexible labour market. Privatization [allowing stateowned assets to be sold to private individuals or groups] was key, and included gas, water and electricity. The power of the unions was to be curbed. Public spending needed cash limits. Expenditure on social services – education, housing, the arts, was to be reduced. All this argued a profound change in the

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UK . The achievements of the Labour government in the 1940s were to be reversed. Arthur Birling would have adored Mrs Thatcher. These changes were fiercely resisted by some. There were riots in London, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool, largely by ethnic minorities. The riots were about the lack of jobs, and about discrimination. By 1981, unemployment stood at 2.5 million. Of these, 82 per cent were from ethnic minorities. The government was on the defensive. Fortunately for the Prime Minister, if not necessarily the country, a foreign war diverted attention, when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands [also known as Las Malvinas] in the South Atlantic in April 1982. Mrs Thatcher personally managed the war. A victory, together with an economic recovery, swept her to a clear majority in the 1983 General Election. Empowered by her political dominance, she continued her radical policies. The miners’ union was destroyed. Financial controls were removed from all areas of financial activity. A free market enabled domestic and foreign banks and companies to buy up anything profitable. British Telecom was privatized in 1984; British Gas in 1986; British Airways in 1987. And the privatization of electricity began at the end of the decade. The Welfare State trembled under the onslaught.

The miners Mrs Thatcher had watched the miners strike and triumph in the seventies, and was determined that it would not happen again. With coal reserves built up, she ordered the closure of 20 state-owned pits, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Two thirds of miners went on strike in March 1984. They were labelled by the Prime Minister as ‘the enemy within’. After a year of confrontation, much of it violent and vicious, the National Union of Mineworkers conceded without a deal. One hundred and fifty pits closed, with the loss of thousands of jobs. Entire mining communities were destroyed. The effect is still apparent today.

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Priestley died in August 1984, five years after Mrs Thatcher came to power. He would have witnessed the prevailing politics of the government. He would also have known about one of the most violent confrontations of the strike. This was the battle of Orgreave in June 1984 in South Yorkshire, where the miners deployed between 5,000–6,000 pickets, opposed by an estimated 4,000–8,000 police. It left a scar on the region which has not healed. Priestley had witnessed in his life the age of the Edwardians, the hopes of post-war reconstruction, and now the destruction of many dreams.

Women and women’s rights The spirit of the suffragettes still lived on in the later twentieth century. It was apparent in the strike by women sewingmachinists in June 1968 at Ford motor company’s Dagenham plant. The cause was a regrading exercise which meant that women were paid 15 per cent less than men. The women made car seat covers. As the stock ran out, car production halted. The outcome was the passing of the Equal Pay Act of 1970, a landmark bill for women. Eight years later, a strike of wider significance took place at the Grunwick film processing factory in London. The workforce largely consisted of women of South Asian origin. They fled discrimination in African countries, where they had settled. In particular, Asian people from Uganda were expelled by its dictator, Idi Amin, and came to the UK . As members of former British colonies, they held British passports. Many were educated, and used to a comfortable lifestyle. However, they were welcomed only as workers in low-paid factory and manual labour. It was the degrading conditions which provoked the strike. In August 1976, a group of women walked out in protest. It rapidly became a national issue. The strike ended with defeat. Yet, a vital matter of principle had been established. It was as if Arthur Birling was forced to negotiate, and acknowledge that workers, especially women workers, had rights.

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The most celebrated assertion of the power of women to influence events of national significance came about when, in 1981, the Welsh group, ‘Women for Life on Earth’, arrived at RAF Greenham Common Airbase in Berkshire. The reason they came was to protest against the Conservative government’s decision to site a large number of American Cruise missiles on the base. A Peace Camp was set up. It was to last for nineteen years. In primitive living conditions, the women endured frequent evictions, and attacks, but constantly disrupted the activities on the base. The missiles were flown back to the USA in 1991 and 1992. The women had won. It was a triumph. Lots more to do, however. Still only three women bishops by 2015 . . . getting there?

Post Mrs Thatcher Mrs Thatcher resigned in 1990, and a comparable figure emerged in 1997, when Tony Blair led the Labour Party to the first of three General Election victories. However, his insistence on joining a US -led coalition against Iraq in 2003, despite faulty intelligence, and his belief that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, needed to be removed, has done little to secure him an honourable place in history. In your time, the biggest crisis has been financial. In 2008, the banking system, through its miscalculations, its shortsightedness, and its greed, caused this and other countries to suffer the worst financial crisis in sixty years. The banks knowingly lent too much to people who were unable to repay. Their reserves were therefore eaten up, and they were on the edge of collapse. Some did. Most of the others were bailed out by the Bank of England to the tune of fifty billion pounds. An article in the New Statesman magazine, on 1 May 2008, suggested that the banks ‘were run by bonus-greedy wide boys, who gave no thought to the future and had no concept of social responsibility’. Are you listening, Arthur Birling? The other crisis is war, displacement and refugees. As I write this [September 2015], the war in Syria has killed 250,000

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people, displaced half the population, and caused one in five Syrians, some four million people, to flee. In the second quarter of 2015, citizens of 141 countries sought asylum for the first time. They come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Albania, Eritrea and Nigeria. The European Union reels with the huge impact of the dispossessed seeking a better life in the rich West. If you are Arthur and Sybil Birling, you pull up the drawbridge, and hope it will all go away. Or make gestures – a few thousand admissions over five years, for instance. The refugees want what we have – a decent life. The absence of responsibility scars our times. And Priestley warned against this in 1945: . . . there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, and what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. In 1912, the price to be paid for the benefit of the few fell on the Eva and John Smiths of the world. It still does. In this century, large scale spending cuts are an attempt to resolve the crisis. An Oxfam report in 2015 warned of rising inequality. By 2016, 1 per cent of the world’s population will own more wealth than the other 99 per cent. The journalist and broadcaster, Andrew Marr, links 1945 and now: If, by an act of science or magic, a small platoon of British people from 1945 could be time-travelled sixty or so years into the future, what would they make of us? They would be nudging one another and trying not to laugh. They would be shocked by the different colours of skin. They would be surprised by the crammed and busy roads, the garish shops, the lack of smoke in the air. They would be amazed at how big

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so many of us are – not just tall but shamefully fat. They would be impressed by the clean hair, the new-looking clothes and the youthful faces of the new British. But they would feel shock and revulsion at the gross wastefulness, the food flown here from Zambia or Peru then promptly thrown out of houses and supermarkets uneaten, the mountains of intricately designed and hurriedly discarded music players, television sets and fridges, clothes and furniture: the ugly marks of painted, distorted words on walls and the litter everywhere of plastic and coloured paper. They would wonder at our lack of churchgoing, our flagrant openness about sex, our divorce habit, alongside our amazingly warm and comfortable houses . . . Yet these alien people were us. They are us. The croppedhaired urchins of the forties are our pensioners now. The impatient lean young adults of 1947 with their imperial convictions or socialist beliefs are around us still in wheelchairs or hidden in care homes. It was their lives and the choices they made which led to here and now. So although they might stare at us and ask, ‘Who are these alien people?’ we could reply, ‘We are you, what you chose to become’. MARR

2007, xxv–xxvi

Things to do 1 Research the story of the Titanic – from its design to its fittings to its cost to its customers to its death. How did it mirror the society for which it was created? 2 Construct a timeline from the Fabian Movement and the birth of the Labour Party to the most recent General Election. Why was the Fabian Movement so called? What happened to the Labour movement then and now? 3 What would an audience of 1946 think of the issues raised in the play? And how might that compare with an audience in 2015?

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Themes Responsibility The most frequently expressed idea in the play is that of responsibility: acceptance of it; denial of it; evasion of it; refusal of it. All of the members of the Birling family are involved in a narrative which cumulatively demonstrates their relationship with the life and death of Eva Smith. The extent to which each family member responds as the story unravels indicates his or her basic nature. The word first surfaces as Arthur Birling, in an early encounter with the Inspector, although partly accepting the point about ‘A chain of events’, nevertheless ‘can’t accept any responsibility. If we were all responsible for everything that happened to everybody we’d had anything to do with, it would be very awkward, wouldn’t it?’ To which the Inspector drily agrees: ‘Very awkward.’ Birling believes his logic to be true. And he’s right. It would be very awkward. But awkwardness is not the point. Refusing to accept a degree of responsibility is. This denial on Birling’s part is then balanced by Sheila’s realization that she has played a part in Eva’s suicide. Having her dismissed from Milwards, a dress shop, was a factor in what subsequently happened. Crucially, Sheila, with ‘So I’m really responsible?’ is ready to admit her part, but the Inspector is quick to modify her upset: ‘But you’re partly to blame. Just as your father is.’ Birling does not respond to this, but what has been set up is a developing chain of guilt which will include all the characters at the dinner party. More, it lists the two extremes – an acceptance and a denial of responsibility. Two different generations with two different reactions. This sets the pattern for the rest of the play. The Inspector then uses the two extreme attitudes found in Act One to control the revelations of Act Two. Sheila insists on staying in the dining room in spite of Gerald’s attempts to shield her from any further unpleasantness. Goole: ‘She feels

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responsible. And if she leaves us now, and doesn’t hear any more, then she’ll feel she’s entirely to blame, she’ll be alone with her responsibility, the rest of tonight, all tomorrow, all the next night.’ The blame has to be shared if any justice is to be done, and Goole insists that, ‘If there’s nothing else, we’ll have to share our guilt.’ The steady unfolding of events and the cumulative revelations of the guilty people must be witnessed by the entire family. Sheila understands this: ‘And probably between us we killed her.’ Her father does not. He relies on bluster and threat. He accuses Goole of being offensive, to be met with the withering put-down that ‘Public men, Mr Birling, have responsibilities as well as privileges.’ This is met with the hapless Birling’s unconsciously ironic response: ‘Possibly. But you weren’t asked to come here to talk to me about my responsibilities.’ The most powerful exchange to do with the story now arrives as the Inspector turns to Mrs Birling in her capacity as a prominent member of the Brumley Women’s Charity Organization. She walks straight into the trap set by Goole’s questioning. And the terrible truth is unfolded about her using her influence to deny any kind of help to a pregnant Eva, a contributing factor to the latter’s suicide. Even then, she denies her responsibility in the tragedy, and insists that it is the father of Eva’s child who must take all the blame. The Inspector agrees, but the father of the child is only as culpable as her: ‘It’s his responsibility.’ But, ‘That doesn’t make it any the less yours.’ Mrs Birling is condemned, because of her refusal even to concede minimal involvement: ‘I’m sorry she should have come to such a horrible end. But I accept no blame for it at all.’ As the Act moves towards its conclusion, perhaps the audience realizes who the father is. Mrs Birling insists that the father be made a public example of, Sheila grasps the truth, and Eric makes a dramatic entrance. Eric tells his story and his father hits the roof, mainly at the revelation that Eric stole company money to give to Eva. As both men round on each other, Goole sardonically remarks that, ‘You’ll be able to divide the responsibility between you when I’ve gone.’ As the time nears for the Inspector to leave, he

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judges the family: ‘each of you helped to kill her. Remember that. Never forget it.’ Goole works his way through the members of the family, beginning with Sybil Birling, for whom he reserves his most ferocious criticism: ‘Remember what you did.’ She is silent. Eric is dismissed briefly, but Birling is the one who started the whole miserable saga, and he is forcefully told so. Sheila cries quietly. Goole exempts Gerald to some extent since he at least ‘had some affection for her and made her happy for a time’. Goole then makes one of the great speeches of the play, as Eva becomes representative ‘of millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths . . . We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.’ He warns of the dire consequences if that is not understood. And the Inspector leaves. Whether he goes knowing that of all the people that remain, only two will face up to the consequences of their actions is unclear. Perhaps that is the best that can be expected. Sheila and Eric recoil from the relief of their parents – and Gerald – as they begin to believe they have been the victims of a hoax. The parents’ reputations, their place in society is maintained. All is well. Until the final telephone call upends their satisfaction.

Class, hierarchy and the role and status of women Upper-middle and upper This important theme in the play is about privilege, assumptions of superiority, and the actions which flow from a situation created out of this. It is the context within which Eva suffered. The Birlings live their lives in ignorance of those below them, and, for some family members, in anticipation of joining those above them. It is an ordinary, somewhat boring uppermiddle-class family, insulated by money [new, not inherited], and looking to ascend to the promised land of the aristocracy. It is important that they are ordinary. This is so that what they

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think, do and say, becomes representative of their class. There is nothing unique here. At the dinner party, the head of the house is happy, because his daughter is engaged. To a man whose parents are landed gentry. The same parents who declined to attend the dinner party: ‘It’s a pity Sir George and – er – Lady Croft can’t be with us, but they’re abroad and so it can’t be helped. As I told you, they sent me a very nice cable – couldn’t be nicer.’ Birling’s ambition is intense, and he nervously suggests to Gerald that Lady Birling ‘feels you might have done better for yourself socially.’ He hints that he is in line for a knighthood, and accepts premature congratulations from Gerald. Birling has therefore a good deal riding on the engagement: ‘Just a knighthood, of course.’ His wife is watchful in order to maintain her sense of propriety. She rebukes her husband for mentioning the cook in front of a guest. For her, it is also inappropriate to talk business over the dinner table. Birling’s fault again. She is, as the early stage direction indicates, ‘Her husband’s social superior’. She probably married him for his money. She controls etiquette in her household, and also the language used, especially by Sheila. Mrs Birling embodies a particular class attitude, which she maintains throughout the play. Encased in her assumptions, she refuses, or is too frightened, to modify her views of the world. That refusal will kill Eva. Mrs Birling will later perform her charitable work, which was standard for women of her class, but this time with horrific consequences. Under pressure from Goole, she admits that she chaired the charity committee two weeks earlier. Such a position emphasizes her status within the stratum of society which she inhabits. Charitable work insists on the importance of acceptance, particularly by recipients, of the way things are. It is ultimately a political statement. But Mrs Birling is upset and annoyed with the young woman who called herself Mrs Birling. She ‘didn’t like her manner’. So, charitable giving depends on whether a prominent member of the committee likes the applicant. Not enough to be in desperate need. You need to ensure you are liked as well. In the words of the Inspector,

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Mrs Birling ‘slammed the door in her face’. The rigid division of the hierarchy is apparent, as she judges Eva: ‘As if a girl of that sort would ever refuse money.’ It is an attitude comparable to Eric’s use of Eva, and Gerald’s somewhat more kindly treatment of her. In the end, Daisy exists to be used by her social superiors. Sheila, Eric and Gerald, all happily live within a cocoon of privilege, venturing out only to buy more clothes, or the men to seduce one of the local girls. Their contact with other classes is limited. And they are always able to retreat to the comfort of home. For those, however, who inhabit the world of work, life is rather different. Birling employs a large workforce. He is the sole arbiter of who stays and who goes. His authority is absolute. When tested, as it was by Eva, he acts as the authoritarian boss he and his colleagues are. A demand for a wage rise from 22 shillings and sixpence to 25 shillings [the British currency before decimalization; 22 shillings is, now, about £65; 25 shillings is £71. Not much of a payrise] is rejected, and a group of women go on strike. After a few weeks, they gave in. The ringleaders are sacked. Birling’s justification for his action is that a pay rise would have added 12 per cent to his labour costs. Eva Smith ‘had a lot to say – far too much – so she had to go’. Gerald endorses Birling’s action: ‘You couldn’t have done anything else.’ Labour and bosses clash, without a hope of labour winning. Awkward employees are easily dismissed. The ruling class is not about to cede power. The labouring class is fine, as long as it knows its place like Edna, the parlour-maid, or the employees of Milwards. An audience in 1945 would perhaps reflect on progress in labour relations. Here, though, the clash of the workers and the owners is set out in miniature as a function of the period before the Great War. The play tracks the lower-class world via Eva. After her dismissal at Milwards, she lived on very little, was ‘rescued’ by Gerald from a bar, after being propositioned by a drunken Alderman, and installed in a set of rooms, where they became lovers. Whether Gerald felt sorry for her, as he insists, the fact is that women in Eva’s situation were preyed on by men who

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were indulgently allowed by their peers to ‘sow their wild oats’. Eva is exploited because she has no means of resisting and no power. Just a penniless working-class woman. An early audience in the mid-forties, after a war which, to some extent, liberated working women, and valued them, would certainly be outraged at the ruling class of 1912. Such an audience would also recognize there was still much to be achieved. Would an audience of this twenty-first century believe that the battle for equality was now over? Eva stands for all the women of her day, as does the John Smith named in Goole’s final speech. As the Inspector presses Mrs Birling for the truth, Mr Birling’s response is characteristically to do with his position in society. A matter of face and reputation: ‘I must say, Sybil, that when this comes out at the inquest, it isn’t going to do us much good. The press might easily take it up.’ His fear of his peers is tellingly expressed, as is his efforts to cover up the fact that Eric stole fifty pounds from the office to give to Eva. Social standing is of paramount importance to Birling. But his definition of ‘good’ begs the question. His relief when Gerald suggests that Goole wasn’t a policeman is repulsive in its happiness, and he ignores the protests of his children. For him, it’s as if this was all a terrible dream. His knighthood would have gone for ever. His social position would be ruined. Lady Croft would forbid her son’s wedding to Sheila. A life – his – in ruins. And it is. The final telephone call has him ‘panic-stricken’. It is all true. It is hard to imagine any sympathy for him and his wife. From anyone.

Things to do 1 Find the reasons why Arthur Birling wants his daughter married to Gerald. 2 The Birlings are rich, well thought of and well regarded. Why then is the family so dysfunctional? 3 What is the significance of drink in the play?

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4 Pick out examples from the text which show uppermiddle-class attitudes to the working class. 5 How does Priestley show generational conflict through the dialogue of the play (look particularly at how Sybil speaks to and refers to her children)? 6 It is unclear why Eva changes her name – even to the author of this Guide! Is it to help her make a new start? Is her name proving a barrier to finding a new job? What ideas do you have to explain the name change?

Characters Eva Smith Eva exists, apparently, only in the minds of the characters in the play. She is in fact still alive, but the play works, as does the audience, on the assumption that she is recently dead. Towards the end of the play, the Inspector says: ‘And my trouble is – that I haven’t much time.’ If this is a reference to the telephone call at the play’s end, which announces Eva’s very recent death, and concludes the play, it follows that time has somehow been manipulated, and that the central action of the piece anticipates the ‘real action’. The family having been made to confess, or face an unpalatable truth, must now consider its actions before the ‘real’ inspector arrives. Eva’s character is mainly assembled by Inspector Goole, from his interrogation of the family. We build a picture out of what is volunteered or extracted from the other figures. She is created out of what is said of her. What is said reflects the nature of who says it. Shockingly, Goole announces a young woman’s death by suicide before identifying her. He spares no detail as to the manner of her agonizing last hours. Strong disinfectant was

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cheap, easily available at the time, and used by desperate, impoverished working-class people. Birling, understandably at this stage, wonders why this is being said here and now. But the Inspector invades Birling’s sentence to announce that the young woman’s name was Eva Smith, and that she left a letter and a diary in her room. Goole hands Eva’s photograph first to Arthur Birling. Significantly, he seems ‘to remember hearing that name – Eva Smith – somewhere’. Told that she was employed by Birling, the businessman replies; ‘Oh – that’s it, is it? Well, we’ve several hundred young women there, y’know, and they keep changing.’ For Birling, Eva’s just another worker. For an audience, the linking of one worker to ‘several hundred’ expands the image to represent a work force, which Eva partly comes to represent. Birling, in fact, remembers Eva clearly, and the reasons as to why she was sacked. But since the sacking was ‘more than eighteen months ago . . . obviously it has nothing whatever to do with the wretched girl’s suicide’. And so begins the process of forcing Birling to understand how it has everything to do with ‘the wretched girl’s suicide’. Birling’s denial of responsibility pushes him into some justification of the action he took. According to him, she was ‘a lively good-looking girl – country-bred, I fancy’, who was up for promotion, and who asked as part of a group of workers, for a pay rise. Birling’s reason for the demand is that after their holidays ‘they were all rather restless’, whatever he means by that. A strike leads to the ‘ringleaders’ being sacked. They are, after all, employed on a kind of zero-hours contract basis. Birling particularly points out that Eva had ‘a lot to say – far too much – so she had to go’. In other words, she was neither submissive, nor obedient, cardinal sins in Birling’s world. The world of the owners. Birling assumes that what happened to Eva was that she would ‘get into trouble? Go on the streets?’ She clearly is of no importance to someone like him. Meanwhile, Eric and Gerald say little, having been denied a look at the photo. Relentlessly, Goole continues his account of Eva, and her descent into misery. Two months out of work, parents dead, no relatives, no money, few friends, lonely. A desperate existence.

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However, there’s one moment of happiness as Eva secures a position in a dress shop, only to be dismissed by the owners after a client complained about her conduct. Sheila. Petulance sets Eva on a downward spiral. She becomes Daisy Renton. She becomes what both senior Birlings believe girls of her class are in any case. Sybil Birling eases any conscience she may possess by suggesting that ‘in any case I don’t suppose for a moment that we can understand why the girl committed suicide. Girls of that class –’. Implicit in such an attitude is huge indifference by one who chairs a charitable committee. Gerald’s account of meeting Eva centres on the stalls bar in the local Palace Variety Theatre. It is, he says, ‘a favourite haunt of women of the town’. A bar frequented by prostitutes, ‘those hard-eyed dough-faced women’, becomes a place where Eva, ‘young and fresh and charming and altogether out of place’, is being pressured by fat old Joe Meggarty. Why is Eva there? A sort of answer comes later. This is the underbelly of Edwardian society. Gerald rescues her, and they go to the County Hotel, where he feeds her. Why Gerald went to the stalls bar is left ambiguous. Possibly just for a drink, possibly not. Whatever his motive, he did house her in a friend’s rooms, where they became lovers. Gerald, within the parameters of the situation, does obviously sympathize with Eva and her situation, one which he would never expect to meet, still less experience. And his care and attention was enjoyed by Eva, who, when it all ended, went away: ‘She felt there’d never be anything as good again for her – so she had to make it last longer.’ She is twenty-four years old. And she hasn’t seen the last of the stalls bar. As Gerald leaves to walk and think, Sybil Birling comes into focus. She denies any knowledge of Eva, and believes that an imperious manner will suffice to see off the Inspector. She is wrong. Sheila acts as Goole’s accomplice in insisting that her mother does know the identity of the girl in the photograph. And so the Inspector wrings out of this arrogant, defensive and deeply embittered woman the truth that she took against Eva’s plea for help, and convinced her committee to agree with her.

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A pregnant young woman is left to her own devices as the committee concerned with charitable help turns its back. Sheila and perhaps Goole, hearing what Sybil Birling asserts, are horrified. She has contributed directly not only to Eva’s horrible death, but to the death of her grandchild. Her husband worries only about the publicity. Two-and-a-half lines damn him even further. Eric, the father of Eva’s child, provides a powerful climax to Act Two. And tells his story to begin Act Three. As with Gerald, the first meeting began in the stalls bar of the theatre. Eric is drunk and insistent, and Eva has little choice but to do what he says and wants. He in turn doesn’t know why Eva had gone to the stalls bar: ‘She wasn’t the usual sort. But – well, I suppose she didn’t know what to do. There was some woman who wanted her to go there. I never quite understood about that.’ This is unclear, perhaps deliberately. Is the woman who wanted Eva to go there connected with prostitution or procuring? Is that what Eva has come to in her desperation? The writer does not choose to say – perhaps because he doesn’t know. Eric is condemned for he ‘Just used her for the end of a stupid drunken evening, as if she was an animal, a thing, not a person’. As the senior members of the family, aided by Gerald, work to convince themselves that Goole was a hoaxer, and that there is nothing to fear, a final phone call hands them their fate. Their disgrace, reputation and standing is about to be made public – if it is the case that the incoming inspector has access to the photo, the diary and the letter. But then, if not, why would he have questions?

Edna Edna does not have the luxury of a surname. It is not needed. She is a parlour-maid. Her duties are to clean and tidy the reception and living rooms, serve refreshments at afternoon tea, and wait table at dinner. Edna’s function is to do the bidding of Mrs Birling. She never initiates a course of action,

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begins a conversation or queries a decision. She embodies the class she represents. At the opening of the play, all the characters on stage are described. Edna is not. She is her function. Her lines are few, because she is not employed for her conversational skills. Later, Sheila reacts to Goole describing the ordinary workforce as ‘cheap labour’. She says: ‘But these girls aren’t cheap labour – they’re people.’ The italics are deliberate. And, although she doesn’t know it, it is Edna who presents Inspector Goole to the Birlings and Gerald, and withdraws as they face their destiny.

Arthur Birling It must have seemed a triumphant night for the businessman. A dinner party to celebrate his daughter’s engagement to the son of a rival businessman, a member of the aristocracy. Birling can be excused for thinking that his life was complete. His pleasure at his daughter’s happiness is no doubt genuine, but so is his ascendency, via the marriage, to the top tier of society. He is initially described as ‘a heavy-looking, rather portentous man in his middle fifties with fairly easy manners but rather provincial in his speech’. ‘Portentous’ here means pompous; ‘rather provincial in his speech’ defines his origins, perhaps in the North Midlands, where he currently lives. It is difficult to imagine that Sir George and Lady Croft view the impending marriage with enthusiasm, whatever Birling may believe. But just at this moment, his cup overflows. His ambition is both for social advancement, and even more money. An alliance with Crofts Limited would result in ‘lower costs and higher prices’. He is therefore positioned as an ambitious man in both social and economic terms. The price to be paid for such success would not be one he would pay, but his workers will. Thus already in the opening series, the writer has set in motion the frightening course of the play – for everyone. Birling has prepared an after-dinner speech, of a kind he ignorantly supposes will be very welcome to the young

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people around his dining table. It is the sort of meandering speech most young people hope never to have to sit through. He justifies his right to speak on the basis that he is ‘a hardheaded business man’, with a good deal of experience. So pleased is he with the phrase that he repeats it twice more in the same speech. He becomes ‘a hard-headed, practical man of business’, and, a few lines later, ‘We hardheaded practical business men’. Seemingly oblivious to any response, apart from the danger of someone nodding off, he surveys the known world, praises the great achievements of the age, and poohpoohs the notion of war as inconceivable. Accepting Gerald’s smarmy agreement, and sweeping aside Eric’s concerns, he ends with an attack on the Bernard Shaws and H.G. Welleses of the world, both of whom would certainly eat him intellectually for breakfast. The crucial effect of Birling’s speech is the presentation of ignorance-about the world, about his position and about his family. Presiding as he does in affluent smugness, he is totally unprepared for what is about to happen. The consequence of that is his inability to accept blame, and his desperation to do anything to retrieve his status. After all, he was Lord Mayor, a magistrate, and plays golf with the Chief Constable. Goole shows Birling Eva’s photograph. His reflex reaction is that he employs ‘several hundred young women’. Nothing to do with him. He is forced to concede, faintly, that there may be a connection between his sacking Eva, and the narrative which ensued. It is for him of no consequence. Unfortunate, but irrelevant. A man of this superficiality, once dislodged, struggles to regain his position. It is all he has. But Goole sabotages all his efforts to remain in control. There is to be no escape. Once Birling has said what he knows about Eva, he is pushed to the side lines, marginalized in his own house, and reduced to uttering vague threats. Towards the end of the play, he senses hope, once Goole has gone, of acting as if nothing has happened. His children despise him. He really believes, supported by his wife and Gerald, that they have been victims of a hoax. And he ignores the cries of Sheila and Eric

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that the truth cannot be ignored. One of the saddest lines in the play is Eric’s. Asked by his father why he did not come to him when he got into trouble, Eric delivers a damning judgement: ‘Because you’re not the kind of father a chap could go to when he’s in trouble – that’s why.’ Triumphant in his belief that all has ended well, Birling’s relief vanishes with the final telephone call. As Goole says of Eva’s sacking, Birling ‘made her pay a heavy price for that. And now she’ll make you pay a heavier price still.’

Sheila Birling Young, happy, pleased with life, engaged to be married. All is very well. But not quite. She muses aloud ‘(half serious, half playful)’ why Gerald all of last summer never came near her, ‘and I wondered what had happened to you’. Though Gerald pleads a heavy workload, it is plain that his absence for the summer has left a question in her mind. She is right, and what happened that summer will emerge later. This is a play where important issues often lurk just beneath the surface. Allowing that to be so is a way of building tension. In between her excitement at the engagement ring, and the general sense of well-being, her concern about last summer subsides. She goes off with her mother, and is offstage as Inspector Goole arrives with news of Eva’s suicide. On her entering again, and meeting the Inspector, she is told abruptly about Eva, and rebukes her father for his sacking of her. Goole switches his attention to Eric, Gerald and Sheila, but then homes in on Sheila. She is a feisty, articulate figure who is capable of arguing with anyone. She brushes aside, for instance, her father’s attempt to confine the discussion with Goole to himself: Sheila (cutting in) Why should you? He’s finished with you. He says it’s one of us now. If she has an instinctive sympathy with people, cheap labour or not, she is shaken by the photo of Eva. As she exits, and quickly

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re-enters, her deflation is obvious. She tells her story. In a bad mood, and mistaking Eva’s smile while at Milwards, she used her power as a valued customer to help destroy another person, one unable to resist. What is striking about Sheila is her willingness to accept the blame, and fully to account for her actions. Her honesty in not believing that what she did seemed very terrible at the time earns her a measure of both sympathy and condemnation. Sympathy because it is common to make such an error, but not believe it is serious. Condemnation because it forms one of the pressures on Eva that leads her to suicide. Towards the close of Act One, Sheila interrogates Gerald about Eva, much in the manner of Goole. She is the first to understand that she is part of the mess, but not its sole author. She begins early in Act Two to scrutinise the Inspector: Sheila (staring at him) Yes. That’s true. You know. (She goes close to him, wonderingly.) I don’t understand about you. Inspector (calmly) There’s no reason why you should. (He regards her calmly while she stares at him wonderingly and dubiously . . .) While Sheila has no idea what or who Goole is, she understands that this is no ordinary figure. Armed with that understanding, she implores her mother not to erect barriers between herself and the truth. Appalled at her mother’s pretence, Sheila also drops the pretence about her brother’s drinking. She knows that everything must come out. Nothing can be hidden. As Gerald and Mrs Birling are compelled to tell their stories, it is Sheila who, almost, acts as an accomplice to Goole in his task. Before Gerald goes for a walk, Sheila produces an analysis of what has happened to the two of them since the dinner party finished. She has moved on in terms of her understanding, and, importantly, she finds some respect for her former fiancé. She also acknowledges her part in the disaster. Unlike her mother. Goole goes away. Sheila takes up the argument in trying to make her parents accept their role in the death of Eva. But the

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more they start to think that they might be the victims of a hoax, the less interested they are in admitting their guilt, notwithstanding the irrelevance as to whether Goole was a real policeman. As long as none of it gets out, then all is right with the world. Eric supports Sheila, but the older generation is unrepentant. Sheila voices the sober reality of the situation: ‘. . . you’re forgetting one thing I still can’t forget. Everything we said had happened really had happened. If it didn’t end tragically, then that’s lucky for us. But it might have done.’ And it does.

Gerald Croft His is a subtle and complex portrait. Initially, he behaves like the well-brought-up, well-educated young man he is. Polite, attentive to his host, and charming to his wife-to-be, he is the successful product of a landed family. His world is comfortable. Still, in an exchange with Sheila, he clearly can feel that all is not quite right; ‘In fact, I insist upon being one of the family right now. I’ve been trying long enough, haven’t I? (As she does not reply, with more insistence.) Haven’t I? You know I have.’ Is this pressure a consequence of what we learn later, that in the year before he kept a mistress? This small exchange prefaces Sheila’s wondering why Gerald did not come near her last summer. There is some anxiety apparent which comes out later. It is enough to modify, however slightly, the general air of celebration in the room. There is no reason to suppose that Gerald’s keeping a lover is other than the young men of the day sowing their wild oats, an action Birling later endorses as an inevitable consequence of youth. Boys will be boys. As long as it is all discreet. When the Inspector arrives, and begins to manage the story entirely to his convenience, Gerald is annoyed at being denied a sight of the photograph. We have now moved from the selfcongratulatory world of the ‘haves’, to a world of suicide and misery. Moreover, a world which does not operate at their

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whim, but according to the huge presence of Goole. It must be uncomfortable for those quite used to having their own way. Gerald is introduced, and asked/told by Goole to stay. Apart from endorsing Birling’s action over the strike, he contributes little. He denies knowing an Eva Smith, hovers around the conversation until Sheila rushes out, having recognized Eva’s photo, and acts protectively towards her. Until Goole says that Eva Smith became Daisy Renton. This provokes the involuntary response from Gerald, who recognized the name. His instinct, rather like that of Birling later, is to try to hush it all up in front of an incredulous Sheila. But at the end of Act One, we know that there is a story looming. Gerald’s. As Goole begins to pressure Gerald, Gerald tries to have Sheila protectively removed. Or, he does not want Sheila to hear the details of the affair. Goole knows why Sheila has to stay. Goole fends off an attempt by Sybil Birling to end the interrogation, and turns his attention to Gerald, for this is the sequence he wants to follow. He knew about Gerald’s affair. The senior Birlings are shaken; Sheila not at all. What emerges from Gerald is surprising, and attracts some sympathy for his actions. His response to Eva was one of protectiveness and concern. He did look after her. He did put her into a friend’s rooms. He did become her lover, but when he insists that that was not the initial reason for acting as he did, it is difficult not to believe him. He is honest about his feelings for Eva, and Sheila responds to that honesty. When he ended the affair, he said that Eva was ‘very gallant’ about it – a curious choice of words, not usually associated other than with men. Sheila hands Gerald the engagement ring back [imagine Arthur Birling’s feelings at this point] and Gerald leaves for a walk. He reappears towards the end of the play. By the time he comes back on stage, we have learned the truth about Sybil Birling, and heard the story of Eric. The Inspector has gone. Gerald has been playing the detective. Goole was not a police officer. The Chief Constable confirms this by telephone with Birling. Gerald further suggests that the photo Goole showed separately to members of the dinner

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party could have been of different women. He telephones the local hospital and establishes that there has not been a suicide for months. Gerald has, it appears, restored the family fortunes. He ignores the increasing desperation of Sheila’s insisting that, real or not, nothing can ever be the same. His earlier sensitivities towards Eva seem replaced by the instinctive closing of ranks of the wealthy, and his pleasure of solving the mystery. His last sentence in the play is: ‘Everything’s all right now, Sheila. [Holds up the ring.] What about this ring?’ What will he say to the new inspector on his way with questions?

Sybil Birling Mrs Birling is described by Priestley as ‘a rather cold woman and her husband’s social superior’. Contained within that description is the damning word, ‘cold’, and the implication of unhappiness, at least in social terms. After presiding over the celebratory dinner, where she attempts to maintain a sense of etiquette in the presence of Gerald, she leaves the room with Sheila and Eric to let Birling and Gerald enjoy their afterdinner port and smoking. She re-enters later in the Act to try to close down the effect of Goole’s being in the house. She comes on ‘briskly and self-confidently’ to sort matters out. Her confidence is misplaced. However, this is her home territory. She is unused to any form of contradiction in her own house. She has no inkling of the true nature of the situation. Her ignorance of her son drinking to excess for two years speaks volumes about what she notices, or does not. When Goole turns to quiz Gerald, Mrs Birling is taken aback. She is on the periphery of the action until Goole chooses to bring her back into the centre. The appalling story of Eva’s rejection brings only defiance from Sybil Birling. She is secure in her belief that she has done her duty. In insisting, however, that the father of Eva’s child must face the strongest justice, she condemns herself as Eric, offstage for a long time, enters to confront his mother. Only

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then is she frightened, as the truth stares at her. Her son condemns her as the prime cause of her losing her grandchild, and she is taken out by Sheila. Sybil Birling is distraught. It doesn’t last. As the possibility of Goole’s being a hoaxer grows via Gerald, she begins to regroup: ‘(triumphantly): Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say I couldn’t imagine a real police inspector talking like that to us?’ She is, of course quite correct. Back in the saddle by now, she rebukes her children, and her husband [they will all of them be used to it]. If Sheila despairingly tells her parents: ‘So nothing really happened. So there’s nothing to be sorry for, nothing to learn. We can all go on behaving just as we did’, her despair is met with a final defiant line from Sybil Birling: ‘Well, why shouldn’t we?’ And Sybil Birling is damned.

Eric Birling Initially, he is seated with his back to the audience. A young man, ‘not quite at ease, half shy, half assertive’. Unless he gets up and moves, his part in the opening of the play is deliberately limited. Actually, his first line is not a line. It is described as a ‘guffaw’ [a burst of coarse laughter]. And his subsequent lines do not give much of a clue as to who and what he is. He denies being affected by drink, but if what he says is from his seat at the table, we cannot yet relate what he says to any notion of who he really is. As his father develops his after-dinner speech, Eric, with some impatience, reminds his father of the threat of war. He is cut off by Birling, and then led off by his mother leaving the men to talk of more serious matters. He re-enters, leaving the women discussing clothes, about which he pretends ignorance. Birling and Gerald agree that ‘clothes mean something quite different to a woman’. Conventionally patronizing, it sees Eric nearly saying something which he hastens to pass over. It is one of those moments, which is explained later. He is still uneasy as Birling and Gerald jokily suggest that the reason for the arrival of the

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Inspector may be to do with him. And we learn later that that is true, as it is of the others. Several glasses of port later, Eric, who appears to loathe his father, adeptly winds him up with a dig at Birling’s notion of every man for himself: ‘By Jove, yes. And as you were saying, Dad, a man has to look after himself–.’ And a little later, he responds to Birling’s assertion that it’s a free country: ‘It isn’t if you can’t go and work somewhere else.’ The impression is building of a despairing and bitter figure, full of resentment and strong drink, which perhaps gives him the courage to say things he might otherwise not say. An example is his response to his father’s sacking of Eva: ‘That might have started it’, as opposed to Gerald asserting that his prospective father-in-law was right. He does not yet realize that the suicide is Eva. Nor does he appear to know her name. But he does defend her actions over the strike; ‘Why shouldn’t they try for higher wages? We try for the highest possible prices.’ Nearly always with Priestley, portraits are complex. An unhappy man with a public school and university education behind him, he carries a dreadful secret, which may be slowly destroying him. As pressure builds, Eric tries to go to bed, only for Goole to stop him. He, like Sheila and the others, has to be witness to what is unfolding. Just at the end of the act, Eric takes the Inspector to the drawing-room to find Birling. It is in the second Act that the drinking habits of Eric during the last two years emerge, to the astonishment of his mother. Gerald confirms that this is known locally. That Mrs Birling was unaware of her son’s need for drink speaks volumes for her care of him. Before Goole interrogates Sybil Birling, Eric is heard leaving the house. It becomes clear as Mrs. Birling is questioned that Eva was pregnant. Even clearer, as she demands justice, that her drunken, pitiable son is both the father and a thief. And he ends the Act, ‘looking extremely pale and distressed’. In the final act, Eric’s story is told. At least, the parts he can remember come out. Eva’s kindness is notable, even towards this young drunk. But Eric’s almost uncontrollable fury is reserved for his mother for her part in destroying Eva. He frightens Sheila with

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his vehemence. If he dislikes his father strongly, and always has, his hatred of his mother is overwhelming. It remains a fact, though, as Goole points out, that Eric’s use of Eva was ‘as if she was an animal, a thing, not a person’. Towards the end of the play, Eric, in confessional mood as Gerald returns, sides absolutely with Sheila in admitting guilt: ‘It’s still the same rotten story whether it’s been told to a police inspector or to somebody else . . . It’s what happened to the girl and what we all did to her that matters.’ Both Sheila and Eric remain truthful but the senior Birlings and Gerald breathe a sigh of relief. Until . . .

Inspector Goole The lights change and the Inspector arrives. The writer describes him in some detail. Or rather, describes the characteristics which the actor needs to embody. Apart from his plain darkish suit, what is needed is ‘an impression of massiveness, solidity and purposefulness . . . He speaks carefully, weightily, and has a disconcerting habit of looking hard at the person he addresses before actually speaking.’ The key features are of strength, stillness and concentration. The play revolves around the Inspector’s need to find out and expose the entire truth, so that those involved, including the audience, bear witness to the unfolding of the drama. His job is not to tell the story, but to elicit it via questions. Priestley underscores how essential this is via the large number of stage directions prefacing Goole’s lines: ‘very plainly’; ‘cutting in, calmly’; ‘cutting in, with authority’;‘harshly’; ‘turning on him sharply’. This assertion of Goole’s authority, which is evident throughout the play, consistently keeps events focused on the main purpose. And Goole is running out of time, as the final telephone call nears. For the Inspector does not know everything, just enough to convince the others that he is telling the truth. When Birling asks ‘You sure of your facts?’ the Inspector replies: ‘Some of

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them – yes.’ When Sheila runs from the room on seeing the photo of Eva, the Inspector ‘stares speculatively after her’. Discussing the sacking of Eva from Milwards, he says ‘Well, we’ll try to understand why it had to happen? And that’s why I’m here, and why I’m not going until I know all that happened.’ He knows why Eva needed help, but not why she wanted help. And he appears not to know where Eric obtained the £50 [several thousand pounds today] to give to Eva. Finally, the two accounts of the death of Eva differ. The Inspector says that: ‘Two hours ago a young woman died in the Infirmary. She’d been taken there this afternoon because she’d swallowed a lot of strong disinfectant.’ Yet at the end of the play, Birling puts the telephone down and says: ‘A girl has just died-on her way to the Infirmary – after swallowing some disinfectant.’ Bathed as they are in bright, hard, unforgiving light, the other characters are being made to bear witness, as is the audience, to the details of a mystery, a thriller, which does not end with the conclusion of the play. The change in the lighting makes what follows different from what has preceded it. It is Goole who determines how the thriller proceeds and in what order. His name may be a play on ‘ghoul’, an evil spirit, supposed to prey on corpses. But it is not to be supposed that Goole is some kind of supernatural entity. Nor is he a proper policeman with a warrant card to prove his identity. He is unknowable in a way that Sheila gradually recognizes. In order for the play to work, he cannot be located in the ordinary worlds of the Birlings and the Eva Smiths. He is primarily a mechanism whereby the truth is dragged, kicking and screaming, into the bright glare of the transformed dining room. That being so, he is less of a character than the others. We know very little of him, because it is not relevant to the development of the play. He is a force, whose will may not be resisted, as Sheila understands. There is enough of him displayed for him to enact his function, but not much beyond that. All agree at the end of the play that, whatever else, Goole is not a real policeman. But as Sheila says, whether or not

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Goole was a real inspector, is beside the point. What the family did, and families like theirs still do, remains. It may be largely unrevealed, but it exists. The writer’s purpose is to speak to society, after a Second World War, of the dangers of not facing the truth, and the prime necessity of community. Goole disappears as mysteriously as he appeared, his job completed.

Things to do 1 Eva kept ‘a rough sort of diary’. Why ‘a rough sort’? Write Eva’s account of her first meeting with Gerald. 2 In pairs, write one of the scenes referred to in the play, but not shown [the stalls bar and Gerald’s rescue of Eva; the charity committee chaired by Sybil Birling; the demand for a pay rise]. Once completed, try the script out in performance and gather some feedback from your audience. 3 As dinner ends in Act One, imagine what the diners think the future might hold for them. 4 What do you suppose Gerald’s daily life is like? And Eric’s? 5 Can you find any reason why Sybil Birling’s rejection of Eva is justifiable? 6 Eva becomes a prostitute. How do we gather this from the text? Why is it not made clearer? 7 Imagine you have the job of casting for a production of An Inspector Calls. Choose one of the characters and decide what you would be looking for in terms of height, shape, eye and hair colour/design. Justify your choices with close reference to the text. What do your choices say about you?

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Dramatic technique General structure A three act play with one set and two lighting states. The action is continuous, and the play observes what is known as the three unities, after ancient Greek drama. This means that the playing time of the play follows exactly the amount of time that the action takes to unfold; that all the action takes place in the Birling’s dining room; and that there is only one plot. These are the unities of time, place and action. Three acts is a perfectly conventional structure. What is less conventional is that the gap between each act is so small that there is no time even to get up and stretch, still less to go to the loo or the bar. The principal reason for this is that Priestley does not want the tension to evaporate. Audience concentration must not be allowed to wander. Thus, the end of Act One and the beginning of Act Two is not marked by the fall of the curtain and a delay. Rather, it is indicated that there is hardly a pause, as the final line of Act One – the Inspector’s ‘Well?’ – is also the first line of Act Two. The effect of this is that the audience, as the curtain falls, begins to relax, but is brought abruptly back by the speed at which the curtain rises. Just as you thought it was safe . . . And the stage direction to begin Act Two indicates that the ‘scene and situation are exactly as they were at end of Act One’. Similarly, the end of Act Two brings Eric onstage, wordlessly, followed by the stage direction, ‘Curtain falls quickly’. And Act Three is described as ‘Exactly as at the end of Act Two’. Priestley is deliberately manipulating conventional assumptions about theatrical procedure. If Inspector is about past, present and future, it is apparent that Priestley has, in part, absorbed some of the theories of current thinkers such as Ouspensky and Dunne. Ouspensky’s A New Model of the Universe [1931] suggests that, after death, figures begin their lives again. The cycle which follows repeats exactly the same pattern as the former life, unless there is some

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kind of personal improvement, which would enable the individual to move into a new life. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time [1927] suggests that people are able to see the future, as well as the past. So it is possible to look back and see how earlier actions led to the current position. From there, looking into the future would show the consequences of previous actions, and the possibility of change to avoid them. Some of Priestley’s plays explore notions of time discussed during this period. These include Dangerous Corner [1932], Time and the Conways [1937] and I Have Been Here Before [1937]. Dangerous Corner places a group of people related by blood or marriage in the one setting of a drawing-room, where a guest, Olwen Peel, refers to the name of the brother of the group’s host, Robert Caplan. The brother was Martin, who, suspected of embezzlement, apparently shot himself. Freda Caplan offers a cigarette box to Olwen, which plays ‘The Wedding March’ when opened. Olwen realizes that the box belonged to Martin. An awkward and angry row about the box leads to a discussion about Martin and the circumstances leading to his death. All of the figures, it transpires, had a relationship with the dead man [just as the figures in Inspector had with Eva]. The picture of Martin is built by the other figures in the play [as with Eva]. The box thus becomes central to the discovery of the play’s main truth, for Olwen eventually reveals that she accidentally shot Martin when he attempted to involve her in a series of obscene pictures, grappled with her, and the gun went off. Act Three reaches the moment as in Act One when the musical cigarette box appeared. This time, however, Olwen stays quiet, and the moment passes. The dangerous corner has been negotiated. A seemingly trivial moment which resulted in massive dislocation, the consequences of which are unforeseen, is, the next time round, avoided. It is the equivalent of Sheila’s moment of rage which results in Eva’s sacking from Milwards. As the play returns to a particular point in Act One, so that its circularity emphasizes the possibility of taking a different route, so the ending of Inspector

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takes us back to the play’s beginning. It deliberately declines to say what then will happen. Time and the Conways, as with Dangerous Corner and I Have Been Here Before, is a one-set play, a sitting-room or a drawing-room. Acts One and Three are set in 1919; Act Two takes place in 1937. The play begins with Mrs Conway celebrating Kay’s birthday. Her children are Madge, Carol, Hazel, Kay, Robin and Alan. Hazel is intent on a wealthy match, Kay wants to be a novelist and Madge a political activist. Alan is content to be no one special. Robin is an officer in the RAF. Act Two takes place nearly two decades later. The characters have changed. We are seeing what has happened to them after close to twenty years. Kay has become a journalist; Madge a schoolteacher; Hazel is unhappily married; Carol is dead. Alan has a kind of serenity, and is the only one not to be disappointed at what life has brought him. Towards the end of the act, Kay laments what she has come to: Remember what we once were and what we thought we’d be. And now this. And that’s all we have, Alan, it’s us. Every step we’ve taken – every tick of the clock – making everything worse. If this is all that life is, what’s the use? . . . Time’s beating us. To which Alan replies: No, Time’s only a kind of dream, Kay. If it wasn’t, it would have to destroy everything – the whole universe – and then remake it again every tenth of a second. But Time doesn’t destroy anything. It merely moves us on – in this life – from one peep-hole to the next. Kay’s despair is countered by Alan’s optimism and belief. At the end of Act Two, Kay is described as ‘comforted, but still brooding, goes to the window and stands there looking out, with head raised’.

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Act Three returns to 1919, with the figures in ignorance of what lies ahead, but the audience fully aware, not least of the many ironies of the Act. As a structure, the play is daring, and skilfully put together. It ran for 225 performances, although some critics took issue with the philosophical underpinning, best represented by one Peter Fleming in Night and Day, 2 September 1937: ‘As theatre it gets full marks. Its philosophical content seems to me . . . arbitrary and unoriginal, but you can’t have everything.’ I Have Been Here Before was produced at the Royalty Theatre, London a month later than Time and the Conways. In a note to the published edition, Priestley acknowledges his debt to ‘P.D. Ouspensky’s astonishing book, A New Model of the Universe’, but then carefully adds: ‘It must be understood, however, that I accept full responsibility for the free use I have made of these borrowed ideas, and that it does not follow because I make use of them that I necessarily accept them.’ Priestley was, after all, a dramatist, and not a philosopher. The play occurs in the sitting room of the Black Bull, an isolated inn in North Yorkshire, over one weekend. A Dr Görtler arrives at the inn, only to be told that it is fully booked. Then there are cancellations. The rooms are taken by Walter and Janet Ormund; Oliver Farrant, a school master; and Görtler, whose conversation suggests that he knows quite a lot about the other guests. Farrant and Janet Ormund spend a day walking on the moors, while Görtler listens to Walter Ormund speaking of his past life and war experiences. It becomes apparent that the principal figures are unknowingly retracing the steps of a journey they have already taken, and are on a collision course with disaster. Görtler, rather like Inspector Goole, makes the others confront their past, and decide whether to continue, or change. Ormund decides not to kill himself on being told by his wife that she is leaving him for Farrant. As a consequence, he is able to break out of his former misery and begin again. Priestley’s exploration of time’s complexity in these plays was put to good use in An Inspector Calls. Thus, Eva’s suicide

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is anticipated before it actually occurs, consistent with Dunne’s theory of movement through past and present. And the refusal of the elder Birlings to accept their involvement, and thereby create change, refers to Ouspensky’s notion of change and improvement. By contrast, Sheila and Eric accept their faults, and intend to modify how they behave. Above all, part acceptance of the theories of the two men enables Priestley to create a compelling account of a family’s disintegration. It is not really a whodunnit, more a Oh, youdunnit as well!

Setting The Birling’s house is in Brumley, an industrial city in the North Midlands. It is a manufacturing city where businessmen such as Birling employed numbers of working-class people in the machine shops, and thrive on the money they made for them. The play takes place in the spring of 1912, a week before the sinking of the Titanic. As noted, the precise locating of the setting is close to the outbreak of the First World War. Set against the many achievements of the Edwardian era is the carnage of war, two years away. Within the house, all seems well and happy. Outside, the reverse.

Lighting The two lighting states are, firstly the state that obtains at the beginning of the play. The opening stage directions ask for the lighting to be ‘pink and intimate’. No surprises about this. A spring evening, a dinner party, a celebration. However, on the arrival of the Inspector, the light changes to ‘brighter and harder’. Pink gives way to, perhaps, white light. All intimacy vanishes with the lighting change. Birling orders Edna to ‘Give us some more light’. It’s a response to the fact that the Inspector may have arrived on official business. The interest here is that the order given by Birling, the head of the house, contributes to the atmospherics within which he and his family will be judged.

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Equally, the audience has to respond to the change. A perfectly straightforward situation becomes more complex as the Inspector begins his work. The lighting state now established does not vanish with the Inspector’s exit. It does not, because things cannot return to ‘normal’. For the family, and Gerald, the ‘brighter and harder’ light has steadily transformed the dining room of an affluent businessman into a courtroom, and a prison.

Set There is one set. It is described in the opening stage directions. A ‘fairly large suburban house . . . good solid furniture of the period. The general effect is substantial and heavily comfortable, but not cosy or homelike.’ A director of the play, in tandem with the designer, will decide how to create this, so that an audience can understand the points being made by the furniture. The set needs therefore to speak of expensive furniture, which is ‘solid’. Perhaps not particularly attractive, but large, wellmade, imposing. How to make the general effect ‘not cosy or homelike’? Trying to meet the writer’s demands if you are a designer is crucial. The overall look must influence the reaction of the audience. Such influence is often subtle, and readers/ watchers will have their own ideas about how to achieve it. It has to feed into the complete picture, so that, when things begin to unravel, all the elements come together, uniformly. Sometimes, what a set is doing is not clear until much later, maybe after the play has finished. But the contribution of the set, especially if it is a single one, does count.

Costume With such wealth in evidence, and, given the occasion, it is no surprize that Mrs Birling and Sheila would wear beautiful evening gowns, and accessories, while the three men are all in tails and white ties. This is a black jacket [a ‘tailcoat’]. A white shirt, white waistcoat and white bow-tie, together with black

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trousers, completes the outfit. This affluent visual perspective continually intrudes into the story of a half-starved, penniless young woman ruthlessly exploited, not least by the people around the table.

Props Most plays contain properties or ‘props’. Not many have props which are referred to but not seen. The Inspector found in Eva’s lodgings a sort of diary, and a letter. Together with a photograph of Eva, these are crucial props used by the Inspector in his search for the truth. Without these, there is not much of a case to prosecute. Yet the Birlings never see either diary or letter. Birling, Sheila and Mrs Birling separately see the photograph Goole has brought, which enables Gerald to suggest that there might be more than one photograph involved. Yet the existence of two props which are not seen are in reality all that is left of Eva, apart from the disfigured body in the mortuary. Visible props are in the main concerned with drinking and smoking, affordable only by the class of society foreign to Eva.

The evolution of the play The Birling family tell their stories, some willingly, some with gritted teeth. These stories, five of them, all have a single point of reference – Eva. Thus the central thrust of the piece is contained in the sequence, which begins with the Inspector and Birling; then Sheila; and Gerald; and Sybil Birling; and Eric. How these interrogations develop demonstrates Priestley’s ability to hold an audience until the end–which isn’t quite an ending.

The Inspector and Birling A ring on the bell at the front door interrupts Birling in full flow. He stops to listen. Though he does not yet know it,

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listening will be his main default mode from now on. Edna says that Goole wants to speak to Birling. Birling reasonably assumes that it is a request to do with his being a magistrate. While waiting, he and Gerald poke fun at an uneasy Eric. And Inspector Goole makes his first appearance in the play. In contrast to the finery of the men’s apparel, Goole is in a dark suit, imposing, with an impression of massiveness. The effect is bound to be unsettling. Had Goole entered timidly, for example, an audience would not regard him in the same way. Because he enters as he does, we wait for the reason. It is not long coming. Brutally, Goole describes the last moments of Eva, about whom he would ‘like some information’. Birling, again understandably, doesn’t know why Goole has come to his house. He is interrupted again by Goole. It is a characteristic of his, whenever anyone strays off the path he has chosen. And, as he says later, he does not have much time. Goole targets Birling because he knows the facts concerning the factory owner. When told that Eva once worked in his factory, Birling’s memory stirs. And stirs further, having been shown a photograph of Eva. The others in the room are denied a look, because Goole wants to orchestrate the narrative in his terms. Almost comically, Birling agrees: ‘I see. Sensible really.’ The fact that this in no way resembles normal police routine seems not to occur to any of them. And if it does, they seem helpless to do anything about it. Now, Birling has recognized Eva as someone he sacked in the early autumn of 1910. At this point, Gerald, his good manners, and perhaps embarrassment showing, wonders aloud to Birling whether he should go. Introduced to Goole, he is asked by the Inspector to stay. This begs the question as to whether Goole expected Gerald to be in the house. In any case, it looks as if Goole may have changed the order of the interviews, perhaps because he knew from Eva’s diary that Gerald had had a relationship with Eva last year. Birling attempts to take control. That he sacked Eva ‘nearly two years ago’ ‘has nothing whatever to do with the wretched

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girl’s suicide’. His refusal to make the connection has Goole referring to what he calls ‘A chain of events’. That Birling continues in this vein about how awkward it would be if ‘we were all responsible for everything that happened to everybody’ will have most audiences seething. A view of the character of Birling is emerging, and we are at only the beginning of the play. The focus on Birling as both Goole and Eric wind him up pushes him into self-justification. The story he tells is of a strike led by Eva and a few others for a pay rise, which Birling refused ‘of course’. The language is telling. He assumes no-one would disagree with such an action, and is thrown when Goole appears to want to know why he refused. Birling then finds himself justifying his actions. It is as if he feels compelled to explain himself to someone he considers his social inferior. The fact remains that four or five women lost their jobs, an action with which Gerald agrees. We have moved from an after-dinner drink and smoke to a discussion as to how Birling manages his affairs. He cannot recall exactly how many were sacked. Eric intervenes and is quickly silenced by his father. Birling then tries to frighten Goole with the name of the Chief Constable. How did Goole get on with him? Goole says he doesn’t see a lot of him. And Birling then tries to threaten Goole in an attempt to regain the upper hand. He speaks of playing golf with Goole’s boss. Goole is unimpressed: ‘I don’t play golf.’ Birling sneers at him: ‘I didn’t suppose you did.’ And Eric bursts out: ‘Well, I think it’s a dam’ shame’, to which Goole deadpans: ‘No, I’ve never wanted to play.’ And Birling’s attempt to pull rank collapses. He focuses his anger on Eric, and tells him without irony that, ‘It’s about time you learnt to face a few responsibilities.’ This is a man for whom the notion of responsibility–either to his family or to his workers–is relevant only when it might affect his standing in the world. As he berates his son, both Goole and Gerald watch. Viciously, Birling asks what happened to Eva: ‘Get into trouble? Go on the streets?’ Goole answers ‘rather slowly’. Anger? Contempt? Biding his time?

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Then Sheila Arthur Birling’s daughter is happy as she enters in the wake of her father’s account of Eva. She is engaged and without a care in the world, apart from Gerald’s non-appearance at the house last year. But that has been put aside for the moment. She has been sent by her mother to fetch Birling and Gerald to the drawingroom. Her happiness is destroyed by Goole’s story of Eva’s suicide. It is about to get worse as Gerald regrets that they cannot help because they do not know the dead girl. But they do, but do not realize yet. An atmosphere, previously of self-justification, gives way to a disturbing sense of more to come. Sheila’s strength of mind comes out as she cuts her father off in mid-sentence with: ‘He’s finished with you. He says it’s one of us now.’ Goole tells the story of Eva’s being out of work, and then her employment with Milwards, where she was very happy. Sheila’s reaction is telling: ‘Milwards! We go there . . .’ And perhaps the audience is ahead of Sheila in wondering what the connection might be. As the events leading to Eva’s dismissal unfold, Sheila, feeling the details bearing down on her, becomes agitated. She, like her father, is shown the photograph. She sobs and rushes out. And returns shortly after Birling has gone out, and Eric tries unsuccessfully to go to bed. Sheila has begun to work a few things out. She realizes that Goole already knew about her demand that Eva be sacked from Milwards. He confirms that he knows ‘from something the girl herself wrote’. She has told her father, ‘he didn’t seem to think it amounted to much’. He wouldn’t. Sheila’s story is one of frustration and embarrassment. Her initiative in trying on a particular dress had not worked. How often it is the case that a plan, when thwarted, results in a childish lashing out at anything in the line of fire. Neither her mother, nor the assistant thought the dress would work. It became obvious that ‘I looked silly in the thing’, and she saw an assistant–Eva–holding the dress up against her, and it suited her exactly. And she was smiling. It is the smile which provokes a furious reaction from Sheila. No-one reflects on the fact that

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holding the dress up would be the nearest an assistant would ever get to such a dress. But Sheila’s response was to admit jealousy and spite. It is important that Sheila admits her guilt, as it is for her to understand, in a way her father does not, that something terrible can grow from something trivial. Her remorse is evident, and Goole’s reply is not unsympathetic, but he is there to try to understand what happened, and ‘I’m not going until I know all that happened’. He, almost clinically, forces Sheila to realize what she has done: ‘It’s too late. She’s dead.’ At the end of the sequence, Goole drops another bombshell. Eva changed her name after being dismissed, to Daisy Renton. Gerald cannot help his startled exclamation. Eric and Goole leave the stage, where Sheila begins to work out why Gerald did not see her last year. Eventually, he admits to knowing her. Then, under pressure, he admits the affair, and begs Sheila not to tell the Inspector. This is revealing. He had an affair, not notable for someone in his position, which is now over. But not for Sheila. And certainly not for Goole. Sheila is clear that Goole already knows. It would be futile to pretend. As she says this, the door slowly opens. Goole appears: ‘Well?’ By the beginning of Act Two, we have been given two stories. The contrast is powerful. In the first story, Birling is relatively unconcerned about both his actions, and Eva’s fate. In the second story, Sheila is distraught at what she has done. Act Two brings two more stories, those of Gerald Croft and Sybil Birling.

And Gerald Despite having reacted noticeably to Goole’s naming Daisy Renton, Gerald appears to think he can survive without Goole’s knowing about the connection. Only Sheila appears to understand that Goole is remorseless in his pursuit of the truth. He does so in dramatic fashion: ‘Sharply turning on him. Mr Croft, when did you first get to know her?’ The senior Birlings are very surprised–that the son of Sir George and Lady

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Croft, no less . . . And Gerald blusters, almost comically in response, but he is hardly a match for Goole, who is increasingly aided by Sheila. Gerald decides quickly to tell his story, as if to demonstrate that he has had no part in Eva’s fate. His story is of the man-about-town, finding the play being performed at the Palace Variety Theatre somewhat boring, and going to the stalls bar for a drink. This is odd because the bar is a favourite haunt of local prostitutes, and presumably, there are other bars. It was there that he encountered Eva. As he progresses, he suddenly becomes distressed, as the realization of Eva’s death bears in on him. It’s a neatly contrived moment, as reality opens before him. There is sympathy established for Gerald, which subsequent details of his story support. As well as the questions asked by Goole, Gerald also has to bear the sarcastic barbs of Sheila. As the portrayal of the underbelly of the city develops, note the ignorance of the Birlings, especially towards local dignitaries such as Alderman Meggarty. Eva is rescued by Gerald and taken to the County Hotel. All she wanted was a little friendliness. In her innocence, she had been shaken by Meggarty, and all she wanted was to talk. The question may be why she ended up in the stalls bar, given its reputation. Two nights later, Gerald and Eva met up again. She was about to be homeless. Gerald installed her in rooms owned by a friend. He insists, it seems rightly, that his reason was one of feeling sorry for her. Inevitably, they became lovers. There is some dignity in the way Gerald defends his actions, and icily rebukes Mrs Birling’s exclamations of disgust. As inevitably they became lovers, so inevitably, the affair ended in the first week of September, because Gerald was going away on business. Eva’s reaction to the affair ending troubles Gerald greatly, as she talked of her happiness with him, and her feeling that it would never be so good again. We learn that Eva went off to the seaside to be quiet and remember ‘just to make it last longer’. This last is a quote from her diary. Whatever one thinks of Gerald, the fact remains that he took Eva as his mistress, and then left her. The generosity in the relationship may principally be Eva’s. No silver spoon for her.

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The story ends quietly. Gerald goes for a walk, after asking Goole’s permission, and coming to some understanding with Sheila. But, as she says, they are not the same people who sat down to dinner and ‘We’d have to start all over again, getting to know each other.’ Probably not.

And Sybil Birling Mrs Birling begins disastrously by denying that she recognizes the young woman in the photograph. She persists in not being forthcoming, not knowing how much Goole already knows. Each time she is caught out, particularly when she pretends not to know that her charitable committee met two weeks ago, and considered a plea for funds from Eva. What so clearly upset her was that Eva called herself Mrs Birling, taken as gross impertinence by both senior Birlings. Eva would hardly have known that the woman she faced was Mrs Birling. They do not exactly move in the same social sphere. And it may be, since Eva knows who Eric is, she nervously assumes his name. Goole gets out of Sybil that she was instrumental in turning Eva’s request down. She is defiant in response to Goole’s accusations, and wants to wash her hands of the whole business. She is not allowed to with Goole’s revelation that Eva was pregnant. And still she insists that she is not in the wrong. She seizes on the notion that the unknown father must be brought to justice and made to pay and accept responsibility. Her husband frets that the father might be Gerald, and then what the press might do if it gets hold of the story. They do make a good couple. If Birling represents the ethics of the class he represents, so surely Mrs Birling stands for the arrogance and viciousness of aspects of Edwardian society. Mrs Birling is clear that someone like Eva could not possibly show anything resembling finer feelings. And she walks into a trap of her own devising. For the father is the son, who ‘pale and distressed’ enters to close the Act, and open the final one.

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And Eric Eric’s story is clouded by the effects of drinking. It is, nevertheless, upsetting. The encounter was, again, the stalls bar. He was drunk when they left. Eva a little so because she had hardly eaten that day. He ‘threatened to make a row’ at her lodgings, and forced himself indoors, and on her. And he cannot remember anything. As this develops, Birling insists that Sheila take her mother away from this. Eric continues, and confesses to stealing money for Eva, by now pregnant. The two women return, Sybil Birling insisting on being there, as Eric confesses he has taken the money from Birling’s office. Birling himself is terrified only of this becoming public knowledge. And Eric discovers the appalling truth that his mother refused help to a pregnant Eva, and therefore contributed directly to her death. And also that Eva appealed for help to avoid Eric’s stealing more money. This very nearly breaks Eric as he denounces both his parents. A ruined, dysfunctional family contemplates its fate. The knighthood gone; the connection with the upper classes vanished; the grandchild dead; standing in the community ruined. Only Sheila and Eric can contemplate a sense of shame, and potential growth. The play spirals downwards to a grim end. However, the arrival of Gerald seems to modify the misery. What if the Inspector was a fake? Gerald has asked a police sergeant he knows. There’s no one of Goole’s description on the local police force. Birling verifies this by telephoning the Chief Constable. And they are off the hook. It was a hoax. Even the photographs may not be of the same girl. The senior Birlings and Gerald ignore the cries of Sheila and Eric that they are still guilty as charged. Gerald is acting as a deus ex machina. This is a conventional device in Greek tragedy whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected intervention of some new event or character. It allows a play to end. This device appears to have resolved the crisis. But brilliantly, at the end of the play, the telephone rings to shatter a conventional ending: ‘a police inspector is on his way here–to ask some–questions’. And it will all begin again.

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Things to do 1 Does Goole use a different approach in his interrogation of each of the diners? If you think so, say how and why. Pay close attention to the language of the text to justify your ideas. 2 The ‘pink and intimate lighting’ gives way to ‘brighter and harder’. What is the effect of that? 3 Bring out the elements of the thriller in the play. How are they shown? Look especially at how the play is structured. 4 What do you think the real inspector will do when he arrives after the play finishes? 5 Look closely at the sequence in Act Three where Goole tells Eric that his mother refused Eva any help [in the Heinemann edition, it’s page 55]. Cast the scene in your group and then rehearse it (try speaking the stage directions to see if that helps). Play it to the other groups, explaining how you arrived at your version. 6 How are the breaks between each of the Acts managed, and why? 7 One critic described the play as ‘a kind of ghost story’. Is this helpful to your understanding of it?

Critical reception and writings Creation and first performances: 1944–6 1944. Priestley wrote a letter in the late forties to his friend and colleague, Michael Macowan, about the genesis of An Inspector Calls: . . . when you and I were chatting, you asked me why I had never done anything with an idea, about a mysterious

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Inspector visiting a family, that I had casually mentioned to you before the war. This set me searching my little black notebook, in which I jot down a few rough notes on such ideas for plays and there I found the Inspector and the family and I began to think seriously about them. Later, during the autumn, I made a space for this particular job and found myself writing the play at great speed, blinding on past all manner of obstacles and pitfalls and only realising afterwards how dangerous they might have proved. Apart from a few cuts and the addition of about half-a-dozen lines, the text as it is now is the one I read aloud to . . . some of the family in the autumn of 1944. 1945. At that time, there was no London theatre available to house the play. Accordingly, Priestley sent the play in May, 1945 to his Russian translator. He was popular in Russia. There had been productions of his Dangerous Corner and Time and the Conways, and he was known for his opposition to fascism, and for his strong support for the United Nations [newly established in 1945]. Though relationships between the UK and Russia were not of the best, writers such as Priestley were welcomed. Shortly after arriving in Russia, the play was staged simultaneously by Alexander Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre, and by the Leningrad Comedy Theatre. Priestley was particularly pleased with the Tairov production, and described it in his letter to Macowan: Tairov, making full use of his big stage, built a heavy door with a carved ceiling sloping down towards the door and a raked rostrum, the same size as the ceiling for the acting area of the room; and had no walls at all, only a dimly-lit space beyond the brilliantly-illuminated acting area. This bold device emphasised the symbolical character of the play and you realised very soon that you were seeing something more than what might have happened one night in 1912.

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The approach was to have a strong influence on the celebrated production of the play by the Royal National Theatre in the 1990s, directed by Stephen Daldry. In Tairov’s production, the Inspector’s first appearance was particularly stressed: In the big room of the Birlings’ flat, it was semi-dark and only the table at which they were gathered . . . was brightly lit. But Goole comes in and the whole room becomes lighter, the footlights get brighter and brighter, illuminating all the corners of the stage space, and the light, intensifying, takes on shades of flame, the scarlet colour of retribution, the colour of anger and fire. GALE

2008, 145

1946. The first London production was at the Old Vic in 1946. Priestley described the production as ‘less brilliant and experimental than it had been in Moscow but was, of course, far more solidly rooted in English life’. In contrast, the Russian productions stressed the larger issues in the text. The Birlings’ table controlled the space. Priestley had ‘seated a whole world around a dinner-table, while in the destinies of each person he makes you feel the breath of larger social strata, societies and states’ (GALE , 146). Reviews of the Old Vic show were varied, and it ran for fewer than fifty performances. Some reviewers were dismissive . . . J. C. Trewin in the Observer felt that the play ‘not a long one, could have been stripped to half its length: though their offence is rank we feel that the Birlings are hardly worth this elaboration, this prolonged clatter of skeletons’. The Daily Mail declared that: ‘Only severe self-control prevented hollow groans rising throughout the last act from seat No.E1 in the stalls: my seat.’ Some were more generous. The New Statesman admired Priestley’s ‘beautiful craftsmanship’, and called the ending ‘the best coup de théâtre of the year’. The eminent critic, James Agate, felt that: ‘It is not until you leave the theatre that you

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ask yourself by what magic dullness has been kept away from this modern morality in which nobody does anything but talk.’ But the even more eminent writer, Noel Coward, wrote to Priestley after the Old Vic production: ‘I must write and tell you how immensely I enjoyed it . . . finely written, brilliantly constructed . . . the end, incidentally, was the complete surprise to me that you intended it to be’.

Extracts from critical writings and theatre reviews Critical writings From: Gareth Lloyd Evans, J.B. Priestley – the Dramatist, 1964 The play preserves to its very end the atmosphere of the thriller; the pieces of evidence brought forward by the Inspector slot neatly into a pattern, and each character’s personality and reactions slots equally naturally into the pattern created. The play is a designed morality therefore, but it does not give a sense of the mechanistic. If it is taken on a naturalistic level certainly everything can be judged to be too coincidental and pat, but there are two features of the writing which force the mind away from such a judgement. The first is the Inspector himself. He creates from his first entrance a sense of mystery which ebbs and flows within a sense of actuality. At times he seems to know too much to be a mere Inspector, at others, he employs, with a ruthless efficiency, the methods of question and insinuation which suggest that he can be nothing else but an Inspector determined to hound his quarry (207–8).

From: John Braine, J.B. Priestley, 1978 It should be made plain that there is nothing difficult about An Inspector Calls. It isn’t abstract, it isn’t symbolic, it isn’t

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experimental. It’s a straightforward three-act play with one set, and the action is continuous. Wherever it has been produced . . . audiences have not found it difficult. If it puzzled them, if they found it difficult to follow, I wouldn’t be writing about it now. Audiences don’t go to the theatre to improve their minds, but to be entertained, to be taken out of themselves . . . [At the final curtain.] That isn’t the end. The end is still to come and when it does come it isn’t the end but the beginning of another play which each of the audience will write for themselves as they leave the theatre. What happens in that play . . . is infinitely more terrible than anything which has gone before (115, 121).

From: Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack, English Drama: A Cultural History, 1996 [I]n An Inspector Calls the whole action is motivated by an inquisitive intruder who appears to be a police inspector, but who ultimately turns out not to be. His investigation into the suicide of the archetypally named Eva Smith turns out to be a fictional device; a device which, moreover, is uncanny because it is not clear how the imposter possesses so much accurate information about the members of the family he tricks. This deliberate gap in the texture of the naturalism effectively declares the inspector’s true identity: in his omniscience, his didactic authority, and the cunning manipulations by which he advances the dramatic action, he is clearly the playwright (272).

From: Michael Billington, State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945, 2007 Priestley’s play was a direct assault on the entrenched forces of Forties conservatism, but it has had a long afterlife. In 1993 Stephen Daldry gave it a brilliant Expressionist production at the National Theatre in which the play suddenly seemed a topical attack on the rancorously divisive, selfishly individualistic society that was Mrs Thatcher’s legacy . . . But the theatrical

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significance of An Inspector Calls lies elsewhere. What it reveals is that obsessive concern with using the stage to symbolise and analyse the state of the nation that was to become the animating force in British drama over the next fifty years (17).

From: Wendy Lesser, A Director Calls: Stephen Daldry and the Theatre, 1997 As the members of the audience are still chatting noisily, a siren wails in the background. It is nearly inaudible over the conversational hum, unless you are listening for it. But the siren persists, and soon the house lights dim, silencing the audience, so that eventually everyone can hear the whining clangour that has been blaring under the collective noise. Now the first actor appears: a child climbing out of a trap door, as if emerging from an underground shelter after the ‘All Clear’ has sounded. Occupying the narrow strip of stage in front of the still-lowered curtain, the child stares around him: at the redand-gold theatrical curtain; at the faded and flaking proscenium arch, which appears to have seen better days; at the oddly unkempt, standard-red British telephone booth to the left and in front of the stage; at the audience itself. He wraps himself playfully in the tassels of the curtain while, in the background, muffled, distant gunfire rumbles. Then the boy runs over to the right side of the stage, where there is a battered-looking old radio of the sort that might have broadcast the war news to anxious Britons in the 1940s. The radio is lit but silent, so the boy, to bring it to life, kicks it twice and then pounds it once with a nearby plank-three blows, like the sound that in premodern theatre would traditionally signal the opening of a play. At the end of the third thump, the music starts; a haunting, eerie, melodramatic theme that will be recognizable, at least to some, as Bernard Herrmann’s score for [Hitchcock’s film] Vertigo. As the music swells, more children emerge from the trap door, a girl and two boys . . . And now the curtain begins to rise, causing two of the children to dive simultaneously for the floor, in a gesture that suggests both the fear of sudden

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bombardment and the desire to see into the slowly widening sliver of theatrical space. What they see – and what we, increasingly, see, as the curtain gradually draws upwards and disappears – is a largely deserted landscape covered with uneven cobblestones. To the left, a groggily erect lamppost tilts in the opposite direction to the telephone booth, slightly but discernibly awry. On the horizon is the tiny image of a multi-storey dwelling isolated in the stony moor of cobbles, its upper windows glowing. And closer to us, occupying much of the right-hand side of the stage, is another version of the isolated house. Life-sized (at least in comparison to the distant one) and located in the midst of crumbled, distorted, torn-up stones – as if it had somehow erupted through the ground – this house is raised up on stilts, lit from within, and evidently occupied. Outside the house a hard rain pours down on the whole set; the wartime children, splashing and playing in the rubble, are drenched to the skin. But inside all seems cosy and warm. Some kind of party appears to be in progress – we can catch glimpses of well-coiffed heads and well-dressed bodies through the windows of the house. As the Vertigo music drops suddenly, we hear the undifferentiated chatter of a successful dinner party, from which emerges, in resounding female tones, the statement, ‘All right, Edna. I’ll ring from the drawing room when we want coffee’ (15–16).

Theatre reviews Jack Tinker, Daily Mail, September, 1992 This is how a Royal National Theatre earns its laurels. This is how a musty, dust-laden classic is dusted, is polished and reset to blaze like a new gem in the crown of our cultural heritage. You may gather from this that I cannot speak too highly of Stephen Daldry’s monumental expressionist reworking of the play that so many of us had come to view as a cosy pot-boiler, a sop to the conscience.

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What this timely production does so superbly is to restore the savage heart of its rage against social injustice. When it was first produced (in Moscow in 1945) it needed no such help. The world was already seething with the desire to right wrongs and trample the old class barriers. Gradually, however, the play has dwindled into a curio. Until now . . .

David Richards, New York Times, 28 April, 1994 The inspector is stationed outdoors under a towering lamppost, and the smug family members are obliged to come down from their gilded eyrie and submit to the inquest in the rain-soaked bleakness. Mrs Birling is allowed a carpet to cushion her step. But before long she is grovelling in the filth with the rest of them. Their sullied clothes will soon come to rival their sullied souls . . . Mr Daldry adds yet another element by giving the intermissionless production the feel of a perverse music-hall entertainment. The proscenium arch of the Royale [Theatre], which is shedding its imitation gold leaf, looks to have barely made it through the blitz. Some of the planking is coming up. Tucked away in the pit, the four-piece orchestra spits out its dissonance, while the actors, blazingly lighted by Rick Fisher, venture to the edge of the stage now and again and speak their lines directly to the audience.

Dave Cunningham, The Public Reviews, 11 October, 2013 Director David Thacker [at the Octagon, Bolton] takes a ‘back to basics’ approach to J. B. Priestley’s morality tale examining the duty to accept responsibility for helping, rather than exploiting, those in need. Ruari Murchison’s stage set of heavy, conventional furnishings suggests not just a wealthy household but one in which traditions are upheld and everyone knows their place. Comparisons with the savage social divide in contemporary Britain are limited. Only Kieran Hill’s slicked

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back hair and condescending attitude towards women brings to mind Calamity Cameron.

Review [anon.], The Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, WhatsOnStage, 14 July, 2013 But the play is also a kind of ghost story, and director, Mary Papadima makes this explicit by bringing [Eva] onstage, a presence sometimes seemingly on the edge of visibility to the other characters, to re-enact some of the moments leading to her end. Martin John’s marvellous set manages beautifully to convey both a solid upper-middle-class reality and the disturbing and perhaps other levels of reality surrounding it. The dining room playing area is claustrophobically tight, with much of the stage dark and virtually unused. The floor is a different shape to the ceiling, which itself has huge working cogs and pistons running through it, disturbingly springing into action during the play.

Charlotte Starkey, Manchester Salon, National Theatre on tour, the Lowry, Salford, February, 2012 As I arrived, coaches were departing for, and arriving from, different parts of the North West and beyond. What seemed like an army of young GCSE students was leaving the earlier matinee performance, pouring down the stairs like the hordes of Hannibal’s army over the Alps, but thankfully more triumphant and peaceful, milling around in excited chatter, lingering in the foyer or leaving; then another invading army of young theatregoers approached, sweeping up the stairs like a surging wave to pack the theatre for the evening performance. All were enthusiastic, glad to talk, happy to be part of the experience. This must say something about the enduring appeal of Priestley’s play, and not simply because it is a ‘set text’; this production in particular crosses generations, decades and oceans.

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Things to do 1 In his letter to Michael Macowan, Priestley refers to writing the play ‘at great speed, blinding on past all manner of obstacles and pitfalls and only realising afterwards how dangerous they might have proved’. Can you identify obstacles and pitfalls in the play, and say what problems they could have caused? 2 John Braine, in the extract (p. 61), says that when the play comes to an end ‘it isn’t the end but the beginning of another play which each of the audience will write for themselves as they leave the theatre’. If this is true, what would you write? Sketch out the basic plotline of your own sequel. 3 Some feel that Goole is in fact the author in disguise. What might be the implications of this?

Related work Film and television adaptations An Inspector Calls became a staple for theatre repertory companies since its first production in London in 1946. It also found its way into film and television. In 1954, a film starring a popular character actor, Alistair Sim, was widely distributed. Early in 1961, the play appeared as a ‘Sunday Night Play’ in black and white on the BBC . In August 1982, it was presented in three episodes, in colour, on BBC 1. Two radio productions appeared in 2007 and 2010. 2015 saw a Chinese version, produced in Hong Kong, which attempted to turn the piece into high comedy. In September of the same year, BBC 1 presented a new account of the play, with David Thewlis, Ken Stott and Miranda Richardson.

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Plays and film: some differences All plays reinvent themselves at each performance. All performances are adaptations of the text as written down. The variables, amongst others, are the actors, who rarely if ever say exactly the same lines in exactly the same manner, to the despair of their director; and the audience – all audiences are different. They have different levels of concentration, and different responses to the lines. Lines which produce a laugh one night may not another night. Lines passing in silence one evening may receive a huge response on another. Anyone watching a show, or being in a show, on consecutive nights will have a different experience, each of them unique. That is partly the fascination of theatre. Film, on the other hand, is fixed. Once made, it is permanently itself, and unchangeable. It cannot be modified. Nor can it be affected by an audience. If theatre audiences engage with live theatre, and contribute their involvement, film audiences are without influence. However, film can do many things unavailable to theatre. It can use different and varied locations. The director is the figure via whom all of the action is presented. It is her/his choice. Action which takes place offstage in a play may be incorporated in a film. Film can portray emotion or reaction by the use of camera angles and close ups. If theatre gains part of its power by asking its audience to use its imagination, and create in their minds what is spoken of, film can show exactly what it is talking about. The mystery of individual creation, which is theatre, is replaced by film’s ability to provide actuality.

An Inspector Calls [1954] A number of locations are used in addition to the Birling’s house. These are shown in flashbacks. Birling’s factory and office films women at work, and the group of women asking for a rise. Milwards is shown as Sheila rages at Eva. The seedy bar where Gerald and Eric find Eva is portrayed in detail, as is Gerald’s own flat where he installs Eva. Mrs Birling’s charitable committee is shown in action, and Eva’s poor lodgings are

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evident. There’s a fish and chip shop scene with Eric and Eva. All of this makes visible the contrast between the classes, and between the way in which people live, or are forced to live. Equally, in terms of characters, the major innovation is the presence of Eva. She is seen at work in the factory, querying Birling’s refusal to give the workers a rise; working at the milliners, and smiling at what in the film is a hat being tried on by Sheila, and not a dress; in the bar trying resist the charms of the Alderman; in a horse-drawn cab with Gerald; on a tram with Eric to where she lives; and standing before Sybil Birling’s committee. Her decline and despair are powerfully captured. She becomes a solitary figure shamefully treated, as opposed perhaps to a representative figure of her class in the play. The film shows (as opposed to implies) what lives are like in the world of 1912. Birling is seen in his factory office. To get there, the camera gazes at the workers [mostly women], and, in his office, most of the women are clearly frightened of confronting him. One whispers their demands for a pay rise. But another, Eva, moves through to the front of the group, and makes strong eye-contact with her employer. He is unused to this, and dismisses their request in a summary fashion. Because he can. His power is absolute, and it shows on all their faces. Bringing Eva into filmic being removes the necessity, as in the play, to describe her. Here, she is demonstrably pretty, lively, and quick to laugh. And this is the same vital young woman made to stand in front of a charity committee. That committee sits at a table raised on a platform, looking down – literally – on a poverty-stricken and pregnant woman. The image is resonant, and speaks of the acute divisions in that society. There is a nice touch as one member of the committee, seeing the pregnancy, fetches a chair for Eva. Or putting Eva in Gerald’s flat, as it is in the film, that is to say, somewhere she would never have been before, serves to stress that what is ordinary, and taken for granted by one, is magical for another. Inspector Goole becomes Inspector Poole, perhaps to remove any association with the supernatural. Poole in the film, however, seems remote and other worldly, a father-confessor,

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consulting his watch steadily, and patiently, towards the end, sitting in a rocking chair in the drawing-room, while Birling tries to establish who he is. As he appeared silently through the French windows, and goes through the film watchful, and quiet, so when Birling returns to the drawing-room, the only movement is the gentle one of the rocking chair. Poole has vanished. His ‘fire and blood and anguish’ speech before he exits is cut. It is unclear why. Perhaps the director opted for the mystery of his disappearance. Also gone is most of Birling’s after-dinner speech in Act One, lauding the achievements of the Edwardians, and dismissing the possibility of war. Although expansion does not necessarily mean dilution, the angry zeal of the play is only rarely apparent. The relentless focus via Goole in the play becomes somewhat faded in the film. Though Sim was a fine actor, the role perhaps needed a sharper, more angry, though controlled, drive towards the shocking truth. In Bernard Hepton’s portrayal of Goole, the role comes into its own.

An Inspector Calls [1982] The film made for the BBC in 1982 had Bernard Hepton as Goole, Nigel Davenport as Birling and Margaret Tyzack as Sybil. It was broadcast on 17 August, and on two successive Tuesdays. Described as a mini-series, it confines itself to the one set. There are no flashbacks, and, unlike the 1954 film, Edna is given her part back. It opens as dinner is concluded, and three maids clear the table, which is long and set at right angles to the audience. Sybil Birling has her back to the audience; Sheila and Gerald are seated stage right, and Eric stage left. Birling is shown as large, bluff and confident, absolutely used to being heard, although most of his speech celebrating the glories of the age he lives in is cut; his wife watchful, for the occasion is important; Gerald, careful, in the presence of potential in-laws; Sheila strong, outspoken, happy; Eric drunk. Much the same as the play. Edna answers the door, and is seen saying to someone: ‘If you’ll just stay here, sir, I’ll go and tell Mr Birling.’

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She leaves, and the camera pans across to show Goole in profile: a settled, firm, serious face, waiting. As with the 1954 film, Birling’s request to Edna to ‘Give us some more light’, which created a strong effect in the stage play ‘brighter and harder’ is omitted. Goole puts his hat down but wears his overcoat throughout. In one way, what else should he do; in another, it suggests that his stay in the house will be brief, perhaps reinforcing his glancing regularly at his watch. As a film of a staged play, what it lacks in variety, it makes up for in intensity. In particular, the close-ups generate a feeling of figures under pressure, trying desperately to escape the gaze of Goole, but mesmerized by his insistence on winkling out the truth. The interrogation of Sybil Birling is unremitting, as if Goole knows that she is the strongest character in the sequence. She is led, and in spite of Sheila’s horror, leads herself into a logical minefield over her son. This is the more powerful because Goole keeps his distance. The probing camera does the work, and Tyzack is remarkable as she gradually is forced towards the truth. Birling’s protests yield what looks to be the only spurt of anger from Goole, as he rounds on the hapless man of industry: ‘Don’t stammer and yammer at me again, man. I’m losing all patience with you people.’ And he is gone, his work done. The last image is of Birling joining the rest at the table, heads down, waiting . . .

Plays for comparative study T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion [1937] shows an uninvited guest, a psychologist, intervening in the lives of a divorced couple, Edward and Lavinia Chamberlayne. The psychologist reconciles them. J.B. Priestley, The Linden Tree [1947] deals with a dysfunctional family, most of them disappointed with their lives, apart from Professor Linden. About to be forcibly retired, he resists, believes in Labour’s socialist post-war values, and despises contemporary values.

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Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party [1957] sees Stanley Webber interrogated by two thugs, McCann and Goldberg, in the house of Meg and Petey Boles. A study in intimidation. Arnold Wesker, Roots [1958] follows a young Beatie Bryant rejecting her family’s rural conventions to break free in a famous last speech. Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine [1979] analyses Victorian imperialism, and gender in Part One; Part Two is set in London in 1979, and deals with the issues of gender in a contemporary world.

Things to do 1 A film of the play was made in 1954. What can film do which theatre cannot? And vice-versa? 2 The film adds scenes not in the theatre script. Watch one of these scenes and think about how far you consider it to be in keeping with the play-text. 3 The film omits most of Birling’s after-dinner speech, as does the 1992 National Theatre production. What is gained? What is lost? 4 The film also cuts Goole’s last speech about ‘fire and blood and anguish’, preferring Goole to disappear, leaving a rocking chair he was occupying gently rocking. What’s the effect of this? 5 In the film Goole is renamed ‘Poole’. What for? Is anything gained or lost by this renaming?

Glossary of dramatic terms Act the term used to describe the major divisions of a play. In this play, the acts deliberately mesh together without much of a pause.

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Box set a proscenium arch [see below] and three walls, offering the illusion of an interior room on the stage. As initially described in the opening stage directions, this play is in a box set. Character fictional figures created to be performed by actors for the benefit of the play. Actors, not real people. Costume clothes worn by actors on stage. Coup de théâtre a sudden and unexpected turn of events in a play. Deus ex machina a plot device where a massive problem is unexpectedly resolved by the unexpected intervention of some new event, character or object. For a while, Gerald’s argument towards the end of the play about a hoax policemen makes some of the family think they are off the hook. Director the figure responsible for bringing together all of the elements in a production. A very stressful occupation. Expressionism a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. Typically, it presents the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect, in order to evoke moods or ideas. Follow spot a single light which tracks an actor around the stage in order to highlight her/him. Footlights a row of lights at stage floor level, at the front of the stage. For general illumination. House lights lights enabling an audience to leave without stumbling. Or find their seat. Or switch off their mobile. Lighting lights working on stage, without which not a lot can be seen. Morality play a popular theatre form of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It usually involved a type of allegory, in which the hero is

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met by personified moral attributes, who want him to choose good over evil. Naturalism concerns the representation in recognizable detail on stage of ordinary life. Plot the events that make up a story, particularly as they relate to one another in a pattern or sequence. Pot boiler a work produced solely to make its creator a living by catering to popular taste. Props or ‘properties’. These are objects used on stage by actors during a performance. Props are anything portable or moveable. Proscenium arch defines the stage and separates the audience from the on-stage action. A picture frame enclosing the play. Raked many stage floors are angled to rise from audience level to the rear of the stage; hence the terms ‘upstage, centre stage, and downstage’. Repertory companies a resident company in a particular town or city presenting plays from a specific repertoire, usually in rotation or alternation. Before the system withered away, ‘reps’ produced and trained many of our finest actors. Rostrum a raised platform or dais, especially one with hinged sides which can be folded and stored. A place for Sybil Birling to sit with her charitable committee members. Scene

sequences within an Act, e.g., Act One, Scene Two.

Set that which is set out on the stage within which the play takes place, inhabited by actors. Setting the place within which the play takes place, inhabited by characters. Stage directions instructions in the script indicating stage actions, movement, production demands, or emotional reactions.

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Stalls ground level seats in front of the stage. Often the best seats in the house. Here, the stalls bar by definition hosts patrons of the theatre with some wealth. Tabs curtains which close across the proscenium arch are called ‘House Tabs’ or ‘tabs’. The three unities of action; of time; of place. After the Greek writer, Aristotle, in his Poetics. In our play, there is one story line; one action [the death of Eva]; one time scheme – an evening; and one place – the Birling’s dining-room.

CHAPTER TWO

Behind The Scenes Stephen Daldry (director) The Royal National Theatre, 1992 Meeting with Stephen Daldry . . . We talk about a number of possible plays. He wants to do An Inspector Calls which he’s done at York. I’m extremely sceptical and ask him to justify it. He describes his production-political parable, exploding house, real rain-and I’m hooked. EYRE

2003, 182

Eyre, then the Artistic Director of the National, was not alone in being hooked. The production would become the most successful play revival in British theatre history. Between 1992 and 2012, the play went on over ten UK and international tours. Its eleventh began in 2015. Why?

Origins In 1989, Derek Nicholls, who ran the Theatre Royal in York, invited Daldry, then a free-lance director, to direct An Inspector Calls. Daldry was not keen, since the play was widely regarded as a staple for provincial repertory, and little more. But accounts 75

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of the initial expressionistic Russian productions in 1945 persuaded Daldry, together with his costume and set designer, Ian MacNeil, and his lighting designer, Rick Fisher, to re-think the possibilities of the piece for York. An initial strategy was for an all-male cast to play Second World War soldiers in the North African desert, waiting to go home, and debating whether to vote Labour or Conservative in the 1945 General Election. The play would thus express the hope for change at home. While the military context was abandoned [too expensive], the York production did have features which re-appeared at the National. For example, the Birlings were placed in a tiny doll’s house on stilts. Inside the house it is 1912. Outside, a rain-swept, warravaged wasteland. The stilts are uneasily supportive. At the beginning of Act Three, the house tilts forward, sending the crockery smashing down. It is 1945. As Goole develops his enquiries, the mansion bursts open, and the Birlings descend into a different world. For MacNeil, ‘the house is almost a character in the play. It responds to the Inspector’s will.’ For Daldry, ‘the Inspector is in one world, the Birlings in another. He takes them out of their safe Edwardian environment and into a metaphorical landscape’ ROSENTHAL 2013, 488–9.

Why this play? The 1989 York production coincided with the tenth annual conference of the Conservative party under the leadership of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The play had pleaded in 1945 for collective responsibility, together with a general compassion for those who needed it. Daldry was not alone in believing that, as current politics stood, little of that vision remained, and that therefore the play’s relevance, if anything, had intensified. If the senior Birlings and Gerald stay entrenched in 1912, and the silent observers outside the mansion stand for a post-1945 society, then the audience is very much in the 1990s, and the future. It is a triple time frame, stretching over

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nearly a century to ask what, if anything, has changed: ‘I watched a run-through in the rehearsal room yesterday and it seemed to me particularly pertinent as a call to arms for collective responsibility against the wild, unregulated, and purely profit-driven selfishness that’s created vast levels of unemployment and distress throughout the world’ (DALDRY , Independent, 25 September 2009). Daldry picked up on Priestley’s interest in theories of time current when the play was written, for example the notion that in a fourth dimension, past, present and future co-exist, to develop the three way time scheme of the production. As the play was revived and worked its way through the early years of our century, even Daldry was surprised at the continuing and evolving relevance of the piece. If in 1946, the Inspector’s attack on the complacency of the Birlings chimed with the optimism of a post-war Labour government, so in 1992, audiences responded to the play’s demands: It’s not just saying, ‘Let’s go out and get a different government’. It’s ‘Let’s go out and get a new moral perspective’. What’s kept it alive is that as the political landscape has changed, Priestley’s play has yielded to different political priorities. There was a moment when everybody was going on about single mothers, and the play features a single mother and a debate about whether she should get state support or be supported by the father. So the political arguments within the play whether they’re about collective or individual responsibility or the idea of society have never aged. It has kept its potential for commentary on the times we live in. DALDRY ,

Independent, 25 September 2009

Getting the play on All directors work with the text they decide will fit best in a particular context. Directors are committed to presenting the

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best possible version of the play, according to their judgement, and, for that reason, changes might be inevitable. For example, the first intelligible line in Daldry’s account is: ‘All right, Edna. I’ll ring from the drawing-room when we want coffee. Probably in about half an hour.’ This is nearly twenty lines in. The earlier lines are absorbed within the house before it opens. It’s the wealthy at play, in a general hubbub of conversation. Birling’s reference to Gerald’s parents being abroad, and unable to attend the dinner is cut, perhaps because there are ample opportunities elsewhere to mark his snobbery. Significantly, Birling’s long speech about the glories of the Edwardian age is severely condensed, reduced essentially to his reference to 1940, and how by then there will be peace and prosperity everywhere – ‘except of course in Russia’. This text focuses strongly on the 1940s to now. All directors act in this way in order to present their version of the play. Daldry’s production reflects his interest in the two Russian productions in 1944, as opposed to the 1945 British production. The Russians took their cue from Priestley’s opening note to the play, which suggested that a conventional box set [which simulates three walls and the ceiling of a room], was difficult and that ‘Producers . . . would be well advised to dispense with an ordinary realistic set . . .’ This amounts to an invitation to directors to think more imaginatively about the play’s possibilities. For Daldry and his team, the approach was expressionistic* and filmic. Added to this was the use of film noir, a term used to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those which emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivation. Thus the Birling’s house on stilts resembles the house of horror in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960s thriller, Psycho. The music coming from the

* Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. Typically, it presents the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect, in order to evoke moods or ideas.

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radio is taken from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s later thriller, Vertigo. The Inspector’s first entrance references a central image of film noir. He is dressed in a trench coat, with his trilby hat pulled down over his face. He stands beneath a lamp-post, and casts his shadow across the set. It reflects 1940s cinema precisely. We are watching a thriller. For Ian MacNeil, the piece tapped into ‘the unease of the twentieth century. So The Third Man or Humphrey Bogart movies are about unease and discomfort and anxiety and contemporary living.’ So, there is an elevated house in a wasteland, a kind of imagined landscape, where time merges. The stage is lit using side lighting, which allowed Rick Fisher to ‘light the people very brightly but still keep the dark, foreboding atmosphere, which is one of the things which is central to the whole interrogation style of the piece’. Performance ignores realism when appropriate: the Inspector’s powerful speech about ‘fire and blood and anguish’ is delivered directly to the audience. It is a challenge. He, as the ‘director’ of the play, enters and leaves the stage via the auditorium. Periodically, there are air-raid sirens and the sound of plane engines to indicate the approaching war. The drive behind all these techniques is to offer a contemporary audience a brazen piece of fun, a compendium of tricks, of theatre asserting itself as a forum for debate, and delighting in its effects. Being fun does not downgrade seriousness. Overt theatricality, which is a way of drawing in an audience, enables the play then to announce its preoccupations, and its relevance. Daldry re-fashions some of the figures in the play. Edna is a good example. He felt that Edna is past, present and future. If anybody is aware of everything, and if anybody has a spiritual dimension, it would be Edna rather than the Inspector. She has somehow always been in this landscape. Edna in this production is a bridge between the two time zones on stage. ‘She’s usually played as a young maid and I felt it was more powerful to have a much older woman, someone who has been with the family a long time so you get a sense of the past, of her

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seeing from 1912 the potential of the future’ [NT, Teachers’ Resource Pack, 16]. Edna is on stage for the whole play. She is silent throughout, but observes the narrative, and forms a link between the silent extras in the landscape and the principal characters. At the end of the play she is grouped with the sympathetic figures, Sheila and Eric. They are in front of the curtain when it falls on the older Birlings, who have retreated into the house. Daldry’s response to Sheila is to turn her into a more complex and fascinating figure than the original perhaps allowed. When one of the actors auditioning for the part asked him, ‘Why does he make Sheila, do you think, the one who’s able to learn?’ Daldry’s answer was both revealing and self-revealing. ‘He’s a romantic’, he said of Priestley. ‘He always saw women as seers. Of course it’s bosh, but there we are.’ For Daldry, Sheila must initially be as horrible as possible. Then she, searching for meaning, drives the play for a long time. And then she changes. He explained to auditioning actors about Sheila, as he asked them to read the speech where Sheila tells of how she got Eva the sack: ‘The basic premise . . . is that she thinks she’s right. I want you to do two things. I want you to make me collude with you: this fucking girl. And I also want you to get angry. She’s an hysteric, so the anger itself reminds her of what she felt, and alters her’. She actually becomes ugly. In performance, Sheila had two identical dresses. One was immaculate; the other was stained and torn as she owned her responsibility for Eva. He explained his sense of the relationship between Eric Birling and his mother thus: ‘It’s as if your mother was feeding the ovens at Auschwitz but you only discovered that piece by piece [this to an actor auditioning for Eric]. “You mean you were in Germany? You were there at the camp? You did what?” And then you realise your mother is a monster.’ His other explanation of Mrs Birling is to do with his mother: ‘It’s my mum storming down to the leafy suburbs and saying, “If you fucking come near my son again . . .” She is defending her family, which is why she gets so angry.’ LESSER 1997, 232–4

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The Inspector was played by Ken Cranham. As is often the way in theatre, Daldry’s first choice for the role was unavailable. Cranham gave 796 performances in the UK and abroad. He noted that: ‘In the early rehearsals . . . Stephen was too nervous of the play and had underscored lots of the Inspector’s speeches with Stephen Warbeck’s music. I asked him to take it away and he did.’ For Daldry, Cranham prevented the play ‘becoming overly didactic. Because Ken doesn’t demonstrate, Goole never felt like finger-waving’ ROSENTHAL 2013, 490. A last but important example of the Daldry approach was that he felt productions can become reflective, and consequently lose energy: ‘What characters tend to do onstage is to report offstage, historical action. That’s when the play feels heavy.’ To deal with this problem, ‘you have to get rid of reflective acting and put the action into the present so that the only real acting which is happening is the dominant onstage action between the characters’. It is, in other words, not so much about the Birling family trying to recall their relationship with Eva, ‘but how they are explaining their relationships with Eva Smith or don’t want to explain it; or how they are fighting with other people on stage as they are trying to tell, or avoid telling, their story. What is said on stage must dominate the action. The piece is otherwise a mere recounting of history’ [NT, Teachers’ Resource Pack, 25].

Mary Papadima (director) The Theatre by the Lake, Keswick 2013 Mary Papadima is Associate Director at the Theatre by the Lake, Keswick. Her designer for An Inspector Calls was Martin Johns; the Lighting Designer was Nick Beadle; Composer and Sound Designer was Richard Hammarton. Papadima’s approach was based on Priestley’s own insistence that ‘Only an idiot would consider me a naturalistic

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dramatist. I was a wild one pretending to be a tame one’, which, she says, ‘helped to allow me to take all of the liberties that I did, really’. A central concept for the production team was that of the two worlds, the outside ‘real’ world and the world of a small Edwardian family. Within this, Eva became a character on stage: I wanted to make sure that we show that she is not just an idea but that these events happened to a flesh and blood person and we realised that I wanted her present rather than simply represented through the words of the other characters . . . When she’s there we can see the other characters’ guilt and their reactions to their memories are more immediate when we can see her with them and we witness their interaction with what’s left of her in their mind’s eye . . . putting her on stage is like putting in front of them a whole human being full of dreams and aspirations which none of them had asked about when they interacted with her. Educational Resource Pack, Keswick, 21 The company created a Prologue to the piece through improvization, which ‘gave us a quick glimpse of her life and death. She was reduced to just her white nightshirt and a shawl. We saw her going through the titles of those chapters of her life that lead to her death’ (MARY PAPADIMA , email, 28 June 15): In our ‘Prologue’ we see in an expressive stylised movement the mechanical gestures of working in a factory, repetitively doing exactly the same thing, faster and faster, to exhaustion until she’s been thrown out . . . she stands up, tries afresh, and we see her into the next job. Then we find what she would go through in the shop, folding/unfolding/ showing the dresses for the rich ladies, smiling almost forcefully. And she would be thrown out again. Next would be the effort to have herself ‘presented’, posing reluctantly to be

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seen by men in bars. She would try to stand, and melt like a soulless doll, beg on her knees, hands out . . . Then she crawls all around the Birlings’ world-pleading for help-a hand out, asking to be heard by those frozen statues, in vain. She would end up in a frantic climax where all these different gestures/movements [hammering/pushing/folding/ unfolding/standing/melting] would be repeated, crescendo and crush her. All these were happening around the stage and her final climactic moment was amongst those cruel structures of the set which were supporting the Birlings’ world . . . Eva had no interaction with the Birlings’ world during the Prologue. They are already onstage in a frozen tableau and in silhouette, while Eva is caught by a follow-spot, with different colours around her, together with smoke. MARY PAPADIMA ,

email, 28 June 15

The overall design of the piece came from discussions between director and designer. Martin Johns felt that ‘we wanted to create the world that Birling had made his money from, a cruel and mechanical world. And we wanted to contain the Birling family quite tightly. We also wanted to ensure that when they see the ghost the mechanisms turn’ [this proved impractical. The effect was eventually created by the lighting]. Johns points out that Priestley, in his initial stage directions, had his set move, to either open up or close down the space . . . decisions were made about raising the floor and raking it and having the simplicity of a single door . . . this remarkably gave us the opportunity for [Goole] to stand with his back to the audience when he’s on the lower elevation and for the audience still to see the reaction of all the other characters . . . the characters are somehow presented to the audience – it’s as if we’re presenting them on a plate. ER Pack, 31–2

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Once basic decisions were made for the set, the detail came into play. For example, the machinery needed colour, but ‘how red do we want the edges of the machinery to be, how rusty, how blood-coloured . . . We felt that the machinery stage left was too soft and too kind, so we added more cogs’ [ER Pack, 32]. Then there was the table, the size of which affects actors’ movement. Finally, 10cm were taken from each end, and this showed how the actors could move in a carefully confined space. 20cm changed the dynamic of a scene. A chandelier was removed because it affected the sightlines from the theatre circle. The dining table chairs needed to be open-backed so that they did not form a barrier to the table. These small moments, carved out in response to the overall concept, created the production and gave it its values. Apart from the Prologue, Eva appears in inserted scenes during the play. They are all silent. She appears each time her photograph is shown by the Inspector to someone on stage. These are very brief moments – like a snapshot. She would also appear during each person’s interrogation. So her first appearance is to Mr Birling, who always has his back to her; then to Sheila, and shows her the dress, echoing the Prologue. Sheila relives the moment. As her guilt hits her, Eva runs off stage. She then appears twice to Gerald. On the second occasion, he sees her looking at him from a distance. Mrs Birling is next. Then Eric is profoundly affected by Eva, as she appears visibly pregnant. Eric glances at her often, almost tries to explain to her, and becomes affected by her presence. The director dropped the three-act structure of the original, and opted for one interval, which comes as Eric leaves the house. An inserted scene shows him drinking, with everyone on stage frozen. The scene then follows Eric. He is running away from something as if chased. As he stops and leans over to catch his breath, Eva jumps on his back. He struggles, throws her off, sees who it is, panics and runs off. The lights come up in the house, and with the slam of the door, the play continues. Finally, as Goole delivers his judgement on the family, Eva appears to the entire family in her nightshirt, back to the

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audience, faces the family, and walks off before Goole leaves the house. One of the key decisions to be made in rehearsal was the relationship of the characters to the memory of Eva. Papadima had the actors play their scenes with Eva in the moment, facing them, in order to determine which of the characters registers her, and the impact of that moment of seeing her has on the character: This interaction then had a knock-on effect of how they respond to the Inspector within the scene at that time. These investigation scenes allowed us to explore in detail how each character was connected to her and how their connection with her informed each character’s journey. For example, Sheila takes it on board and it makes a massive difference to how she sees things, which then influence her responses to the others throughout the rest of the play. Education Resource Pack, 22 The Inspector’s relationship with Eva was a feature of the production. During the ‘Prologue’, he is seen with Eva’s notebook, as Birling begins his long after-dinner speech. The Inspector disappears, only to re-appear on the other side of the stage, in his own special ‘lamp post’ light as Birling is talking about the miners’ strike. Then he re-appears, closer to the house to hear Birling talking of ‘Capital versus Labour’. Finally, Birling speaks of community, at which point the Inspector rings the front door bell. In performance, the Inspector senses her [Eva’s] presence and feels for her . . . The more he goes through each interrogation, the more he gets his facts together and the missing parts of the jigsaw, the more this feeling stops being just a feeling. He gets a clearer image of that girl and this drives him further and further, gives him strength and confidence to continue until he reveals everyone’s truth. He himself did not address her directly until his speech with everyone else. He almost summons her for all to see (Papadima, email, 28 June 15).

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* Mary Papadima’s production formed part of Keswick’s Summer Season from May to November, 2013. It was performed in repertory for two days each week, plus matinees.

Things to do 1 Stephen Daldry’s production for the National Theatre asks if the play’s ‘social message can be applied to today’s issues’. What are the play’s social issues, and how might they be applied to today? 2 In pairs, debate the view that ‘the message of the play is too simple minded’. 3 Can theatre be used for political debate? If so, what are the advantages? Are there any disadvantages? 4 In the National Theatre production, the Inspector talks directly to the audience on occasions. What do you think the effect of that is? 5 Why does Daldry keep Edna on stage throughout? What effect does this have? 6 Daldry runs the play without an interval. The Keswick production has one interval. Would you prefer one or two intervals? Give your reasons. 7 Mary Papadima in the Keswick production has Eva appear onstage in both a Prologue, and in five newly written scenes. What do you think is the reason for this, and how is the production affected? 8 In the Prologue of the Keswick production, Eva enacts the stages of her life, from the factory to Milwards to the stalls bar to begging for help. Why did the director feel it necessary to expand the play in this way? During this Prologue, Eva is dressed in a white nightshirt and a shawl. What effect might that have on the audience?

CHAPTER THREE

Writing About the Play As a GCSE English literature student, you will study and write about all three main genres: drama, poetry and prose. Each of these brings its own challenges and its own rewards. Regular writing in class and for homework will help to develop your skills as a literary critic and will prepare you for the final GCSE hurdle: the examination. While the style of examination questions varies from board to board, all of those set on drama texts will require you to: ●

demonstrate an informed personal response to the play;

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analyse the playwright’s techniques;

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support your ideas with relevant textual reference, including quotations;

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use relevant terminology;

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show understanding of the relationship between the play and its contexts;

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write in an appropriately formal style, with accurate spelling and punctuation.

The main aim of this section is to prepare you to meet these demands. 87

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Developing your own response It is perhaps stating the obvious that a play is written for performance, but it is worth taking time to consider how drama differs from the other two genre. When you read a novel or a poem, you are engaging with them as the author intended: writer to reader. This is not the case when you read a play. The author of a dramatic text writes with the intention of it being performed, of a cast of actors articulating the lines aloud and moving around the theatre space as the stage directions indicate. Certainly, a playwright is unlikely to have written a drama with the intention of it being read by GCSE students! Yet while reading a play might seem to be a poor substitute for watching one, it can bring some advantages. It might be a bit frustrating when classmates stumble over unfamiliar words, or speak lines in a way that conflicts with the stage directions, but it can also draw your attention to some important features of the author’s craft. As each lesson goes by, your responses to An Inspector Calls will become more complex. They will inevitably be shaped by class discussion, your teacher’s comments, and perhaps some of the group activities suggested in this Guide; they might also be influenced by watching a stage or film performance of the play, or by reading the views of literary critics. Yet while other people’s interpretations play an important part in shaping your responses, your own circumstances and experience of the world will also be a major influence. Don’t be shy about voicing your own opinions – even if these seem to be at odds with those of others. As long as you express your ideas clearly and support them with precise textual evidence, your opinions will be valid. Indeed, one of the exciting things about studying literature is that it allows for multiple interpretations.

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Constructing an argument Writing a successful argument is a little like baking a cake: you need to select the right ingredients for the type of cake you are baking (i.e. the question); you need to select the best quality ingredients (i.e. your ideas and textual examples); and you need to combine these ingredients with as much skill as you can muster (i.e. the structure and expression of your argument).

1. Thinking about the question One of the most important things to consider when faced with a literature question is what exactly it demands. Underlining key terms and paying close attention to command words (e.g. ‘How and why?’; ‘Explore’; ‘Compare’) will help to steady your nerves and focus your mind on what is relevant. Examining the question closely will also ensure that you do not rush into answering a question that looks identical to one you have answered earlier in the course, but that actually contains one or two small words that make its demands substantially different.

2. Planning Under the pressure of time, it is tempting to skip this stage. However, a clear, brief plan will help you to write more efficiently and will save you time in the long run. Jot down what you consider to be the main points of your argument, leaving plenty of space between them to insert ideas that might occur to you once you have started to write. To ensure that what you write is an argument and not just a list of points, you will need to sequence them in a logical way (you might do this through numbering them on your plan). Although it is common for students to worry about not having enough to say, it often

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turns out that they have too much to say. It is important to bear in mind that you can not include everything you know about the play; instead, demonstrate your understanding through selecting the most telling ideas and examples.

3. Signposting As your answer develops, it is crucial that you signpost the direction that your argument is taking. Opening each new paragraph with a clear topic statement, directly related to the question, will help ensure that your argument stays on track and that it is easily followed by the reader. A well-structured introduction, which engages actively with the question (rather than simply repeating it), also plays an important part in guiding the reader – as well as guaranteeing that you make a good first impression! Try, also, to leave time to write a clearly phrased conclusion that reaches a succinct verdict on the question set (and does not just regurgitate points already made).

Showing knowledge and understanding of the play Knowledge For your argument to carry weight, it will need to demonstrate knowledge of the play by way of textual reference and quotation. Committing quotations to memory can seem a rather daunting task, though you will probably find that key quotations will lodge themselves in your mind whether you want them to or not! Here are some tips for selecting and using quotations: ●

Situate quotations in a specific area of the text. For example, ‘During Goole’s interrogation of Gerald,

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Mrs Birling describes her future son-in-law’s affair with Eva as “disgusting”.’ ●

Keep quotations brief: short phrases are easier to incorporate neatly into your own sentences than chunks of text.

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Select quotations that can be used to illustrate several aspects of the writer’s technique. Take, for example, Sheila’s realization that she has played a part in Eva’s suicide: ‘So, I’m really responsible?’ This line could be quoted to illustrate (a) Sheila’s plain-speaking; (b) how Priestley balances Sheila’s willingness to accept responsibility with Birling’s denial of it; (c) how the play contrasts the younger and older generations.

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Single-word quotations can be useful for making points about language. For example, when Goole insists at the start of Act Three that lives are ‘intertwined’, the single adjective carries considerable force. Remember, though, that even single words require quotation marks.

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Do not use quotations simply because you have learnt them: only quote what is relevant.

Understanding When you know a text thoroughly, there is a temptation to write down all you know. This usually results in too much description of what happens and not enough analysis of how the drama works. Successful writing tends to move from describing a fact of the text (what the audience hears and sees) to analysing its significance and/or dramatic impact. The table below gives you an example of how you can move from description to analysis in your writing. The other two examples are left for you to complete.

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Description Near the start of the play, Birling describes the world in 1940 as one of ‘peace and prosperity’.

Analysis It is a vision that reveals his complacency and is vital for the development of the play and, in particular, its discussion of the idea of community.

The stage directions describe Goole as creating an impression of ‘massiveness’. Mrs Birling often uses the word ‘silly’.

In some instances, you might take this critical process a little further. For example, you might explore more than one interpretation of a particular gesture or action, or analyse the language/structure of a line of dialogue.

Making connections between the text and its contexts A literary work is shaped and influenced by the period in which it is written and, if a work endures, it is inevitably reinterpreted over time. The ‘Context’ section above deals with three different time periods: the time in which the play is set, the time in which the play was written and the play in our own time. This century-long overview provides details of the social, historical, political and cultural contexts of Priestley’s work. Having a knowledge of these details will help you to make informed judgements about the play and to avoid making anachronistic statements [statements that are out of keeping with the period]. For example, speculating about why Sheila and Gerald do not live together for a while before marrying would reveal a serious lack of understanding of the time in which the play is set.

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Tips for writing about context: ●

The text always comes first; contextual detail should only be used when it illuminates a point you want to make about the play.

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Avoid sweeping statements (‘Wealthy Edwardians treated the poor with contempt’).

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Never begin your essay with a paragraph of historical background or a potted biography of the playwright!

Writing about character Examination questions often focus on one or more of the play’s characters. One important thing to note is that they often ask you to analyse how a character is presented. This wording is specifically chosen to remind you that characters in a play (or a novel for that matter) are not real people, but dramatic constructs. In exploring a playwright’s methods of characterization, you need to pay close attention to what characters say and do and what others say about them. You also need to consider how, and how much, they speak. For example, we can tell from Birling’s long, pompous speeches in the opening minutes of the play that he is a man with a very high opinion of himself. As the scene goes on, however, Priestley suggests his insecurity when dealing with those of a higher social status. Take, for example, when he expresses regret that Gerald’s parents can not be at the celebration dinner, before consoling himself with the fact they sent him ‘a very nice cable – couldn’t be nicer’. Reading between the lines here, we might wonder whether he feels snubbed by their absence. Perhaps the hesitation and the repetition of the rather bland ‘nice’ makes this all the more credible as a reading. Individual characters usually have a specific function in the play. If you were to erase one of the main roles in An Inspector Calls, the play would not work, or at least not work as well. Playwrights have the power to assemble the ideal combination

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of characters for their purposes and to create a particular dynamic between them. So Priestley shapes Sheila and her mother to embody two contrasting states of mind: repentance and resistance. Of course, one of the main interests of any drama lies in how a character changes over the course of the play. Indeed, examination questions often require you to chart the progress of a character over time. In this case, you need to focus your discussion on precise moments in the text, taking care not to simply describe how a character changes, but to pinpoint how this is conveyed to the audience.

Analysing a short extract Some examination questions ask you to analyse a short printed extract from the play as part of the task. The extract below comes from the end of Act Two. Read it through and think about what examples you might use to illustrate Priestley’s dramatic technique. Sheila (distressed)

Now, Mother – don’t you see?

Mrs B. (understanding now) ridiculous . . .

But surely . . . I mean . . . it’s

She stops, and exchanges a frightened glance with her husband. Birling (terrified now) Look Inspector, you’re not trying to tell us that – that my boy – is mixed up in this —? Inspector (sternly) If he is, then we know what to do, don’t we? Mrs Birling has just told us. Birling (thunderstruck) Mrs B. (agitated) Sheila

My God! But – look here —

I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it . . .

Mother – I begged you and begged you to stop —

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Inspector holds up a hand. We hear the front door. They wait, looking towards door. Eric enters, looking extremely pale and distressed. He meets their enquiring stares. Curtain falls quickly. Here, Priestley is orchestrating a powerful climax to both the Act and the story of the play. Notice how the lines mostly fall away in dashes, unfinished, apart from Goole’s, a contrast that reinforces his authority. Notice, too, Sybil’s emphatic ‘I won’t believe it’, which conveys what is in her a typical refusal to face up to uncomfortable truths. Also worth exploring is Sheila’s repetition of ‘begged’ which, as well as conveying her distress, emphasizes her mother’s unwillingness to listen to others. This is a good example of where stage directions can increase tension. While it will be left to the individual actor how to play, say, ‘distressed’, ‘terrified’, ‘thunderstruck’ and ‘agitated’, it is clear that Priestley wanted to create a scene of great emotional force.

Writing in an appropriate style Accurate sentence structure, spelling and punctuation will ensure that your reader can follow your argument with ease and will lend authority to what you write. Some quick tips: ●

Write in the present tense when discussing the play (‘Mr Birling is a wealthy man’).

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Keep your vocabulary appropriately formal. In class discussion, you might have said that a character’s reaction is ‘over the top’, but when you write, the colloquialism needs to be expressed in a more standard form (e.g. ‘extreme’; ‘excessive’).

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Avoid long sentences, especially if you find punctuation challenging!

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Use paragraphs carefully to structure your argument (be aware that very long paragraphs can indicate that you are dealing with too many ideas at once and very short ones can signal that you have not developed an idea fully enough).

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Use appropriate terminology (e.g. ‘audience’ not ‘reader; ‘speech not ‘paragraph’; ‘play’ not ‘book’).

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Take care to spell the names of characters and the author correctly.

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Keep a list of words that you often misspell and revise the correct spellings before the examination.

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Remember to punctuate the title (if handwriting, you should underline it; if typing, then it should be in italics).

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In the examination, allow five minutes or so to check through your work and to correct minor slips of spelling and punctuation.

Things to do ●

Track one character through the entire text of An Inspector Calls, looking only at the stage directions provided by Priestley. What does this reveal?

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The word ‘silly’ occurs frequently in the play. Find as many examples as you can and suggest what its use suggests about the speaker.

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Imagine that regulations have been changed and you are now allowed to take ten quotations into the examination hall! Select twenty key quotations, then pair up with a fellow student and compare choices. Debate the usefulness of both sets of quotations and agree on a final list of ten.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY J. B. Priestley, An Inspector Calls, with an Introduction and Notes by Tim Bezant, Heinemann, 1992. J. B. Priestley, Margin Released, Heinemann, 1962. Billington, Michael, State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945, Faber, 2007. Braine, John, J. B. Priestley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978. Educational Resource Pack, Theatre by the Lake, Keswick. Evans, Gareth Lloyd, J. B. Priestley – the Dramatist, Heinemann, 1964. Eyre, Richard, National Service: Diary of a Decade, Bloomsbury, 2003. Gale, Maggie B., J. B. Priestley, Routledge, 2008. Greengrass, Kim, Teachers’ Resource Pack: An Inspector Calls, National Theatre, 1999. Kynaston, David, Austerity Britain: 1945–1951, Bloomsbury, 2007. Lesser, Wendy, A Director Calls: Stephen Daldry and the Theatre, Faber, 1997. MacWhirter, Iain, ‘Everything you want to know about the bank crisis’, New Statesman, 1 May 2008. Marr, Andrew, A History of Modern Britain, Macmillan, 2007. Papadima, Mary, email to author, 28 June 2015. Rosenthal, Daniel, The National Theatre Story, Oberon, 2013. Shepherd, Simon and Womack, Peter, English Drama: A Cultural History, Blackwell, 1996.

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INDEX Note: names of characters and places in the play are given in italic. Characters are listed individually and alphabetically. Agate, James (theatre critic) 59–60 Amin, Idi (President of Uganda, 1971–9) 17 An Inspector Calls (film, 1954) 66, 67–9, 69–70 Archduke Franz Ferdinand (heir to throne of AustroHungary) 10 Argentina [Las Malvinas] 16 Attlee, Clement (Prime Minister, 1945–51) 12, 13 Auschwitz 80 Austro-Hungary 11 Auxiliary Territorial Service 14 Balkans 10–11 Bank of England 18 banking crisis (2008) 18 Beadle, Nick (lighting designer, Keswick) 81 Beveridge, William (civil servant) and his Beveridge Report (1942) 12–13, 15 Birling, Arthur 1–2, 4, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31–3, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 47, 49, 49–50, 50–1, 55, 56,

67, 68, 69, 70, 76, 78, 84, 85 Birling, Eric 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 22, 23, 25, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38–40, 41, 43, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 67, 68, 69, 80, 84 Birling, Sheila 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 21, 23, 24, 29, 31, 32, 33–5, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 47, 48, 49, 52–3, 54, 56, 67, 68, 69, 70, 80, 84 Birling, Sybil 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29–30, 34, 36, 37–8, 39, 40, 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 76, 80 Blair, Tony (Prime Minister, 1997–2005) 18 Bogart, Humphrey (actor) 79 box set 72 Brumley, North Midlands City 47 Brumley Women’s Charity Organization Capitalism, 9 Chapman, Roger x character 72 99

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Chief Constable 5, 32, 36, 51, 56 Conservative Party 12, 16, 18, 76 costume 48, 72 County Hotel 29, 54 Coward, Noel (writer), letter to Priestley, 60 Cranham, Ken (actor) 81 Croft, Gerald 1, 2, 3, 5, 21, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35–7, 38, 39, 40, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53–5, 56, 67, 68, 69, 72, 76, 84 Croft, Sir George and Lady 24, 26, 31, 53–4 cruise missiles 18 Daily Mail (review) 59, 63–4 Daldry, Stephen (director, National Theatre production) ix-xi, 59, 63, 64, 75–81 Davenport, Nigel (actor), 69 deus ex machina, 56, 72 Dunne, J.W. (An Experiment with Time, 1927) 43–4, 47 Edna 2, 25, 30–1, 47, 50, 63, 69, 70, 78, 79–80 Education Act (1944) 13 Edward VII (1901–10) 7 Edwardian period ix, 7–8, 9, 17, 29, 47, 55, 59, 76 Empire 7 Equal Pay Act (1970) 17 Ethnic minorities 16 European Union, 19 expressionism 61, 72, 78 Eyre, Richard (Artistic Director, National Theatre, 1987–97) x, 75

Fabian Movement 9 Falkland Islands 16 film noir 78–9 Fisher, Rick (lighting designer, National Theatre production) 76, 79 follow spot 72 footlights 72 General Election (1906) 9; (1945) ix, 13, 76; (1983) 16; (1997) 18; (2001) 18; (2005) 18 Germany 11 glossary of dramatic terms 71–4 Goole, Inspector x, 2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40–2, 43, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 68–9, 70, 76, 79, 80, 84, 85 Great Depression (1930s) 9, 12 Greenham Common 18 Hammarton, Richard (sound designer, Keswick) 81 Hawkes, Jacquetta x Hepton, Bernard (actor) 69–70 Herrmann, Bernard (composer for Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo, 1958) 78–9 house lights 72 Hussein, Saddam (President of Iraq, 1979–2003) 18 Inspector ‘Poole’ (1954 film) 68–9 Iraq, US /UK coalition against (2003) 18

INDEX

Johns, Martin (set designer, Keswick) 65, 81, 83–4 Kaiser Wilhelm II (1888–1918) 10–11 Kamerny Theatre, Moscow ix, 58–9 Kurdi, Aylan x Labour Party 9, 12–13, 16, 76 Leningrad Comedy Theatre 58 lighting 47–8, 72 Macowan, Michael (theatre director and producer) 57 MacNeill, Ian (set designer, National Theatre production) ix, 76, 79 Meggarty, Alderman Joe 25, 29, 54 Milwards Dress Shop 21, 25, 34, 41, 52 Miners’ strikes 9–10, 13, 16–17 morality play 72 Murchison, Ruari (set designer, Octagon, Bolton) 64 National Coal Board 13 National Debt 12 naturalism 73 New Statesman (review) 18, 59 Nicholls, Derek (chief executive, Theatre Royal, York) ix–x, 75 Octagon Theatre, Bolton 64–5 Old Vic Theatre, London 59–60 Orchard Theatre, Dartford x Orgreave, Battle of 17 Ottoman Empire 11

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Ouspensky P. D. (A New Model of the Universe 1931) 43–4, 46 Oxfam Report (2015) 19 Palace Variety Theatre 29, 56 Pankhurst, Emmeline (leader, British suffragette movement) 10 Papadima, Mary (director, Keswick) 65, 81–6 plot 73 pot boiler 73 Priestley, J.B. 9, 14–15,17, 19, 77; Dangerous Corner (1932) 44–5; Time and the Conways (1937) 45–6, 58; I Have Been Here Before (1937) 46, 58; Letter to Michael Macowan 57–8 privatisation 15–16 props 49, 73 proscenium arch 73 Queen Victoria (1837–1901) 11 raked floor 58, 73 Refugees: Afghanistan, Albania, Eritrea, Nigeria 19 Renton, Daisy 3, 29, 36, 53 repertory companies ix, 66, 73, 75 Richardson, Miranda (actor) 66 Ritz Hotel, London 8 Royal National Theatre, London x, 59, 63, 65, 75–81 Royale Theatre, New York 64 Royalty Theatre, London 46 Russia 8, 10–11; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 11

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Sarajevo 11 scene 73 Serbia 11 set 48, 73 setting 47, 73 Shaw, George Bernard (writer) 7, 9, 32 Sim, Alistair (actor) 66 Smith, Eva x, 2, 3, 4, 5, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27–30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 46–7, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 61, 65, 67, 68, 74, 80, 81, 82–3, 84, 85 Socialism 9 stage directions 73 stalls 74 Stott, Ken (actor) 66 Syria, War and Displacement 18–19 tabs 74 Tairov, Alexander (director, Kamerny Theatre, Moscow) 58–9, 78 Thacker, David (director, Octagon, Bolton) 64 Thatcher, Margaret (Prime Minister, 1979–90) ix, 15–16, 16–17, 18, 76 The Third Man (1949 film noir, directed by Carol Reed) 79 The Three Unities 43, 74 Theatre by the Lake, Keswick 65, 81–6 Theatre Royal York ix–x, 75–6

Thewlis, David (actor) 66 Titanic 2, 8, 47 trades union membership 9–10 Trewin, J.C. (Observer review) 59 Tyzack, Margaret (actor) 69, 70 United Nations 58 Warbeck, Stephen (music, National Theatre production) 81 Webb, Beatrice & Sydney, founder members of the Fabian Society) 9 Welfare State 12, 15, 16 Wells, H. G (writer) 9, 32 Women Bishops 18 Women for Life on Earth Group 18 Women’s Auxiliary Air Force 14 Women’s Land Army 13 Women’s Rights (Universal Suffrage/ Suffragettes) 10 Women’s Social and Political Union 10 Women’s strike, Ford factory, Dagenham (1968) 17 Women’s strike, Grunwick film processing factory(1976) 17 Women’s Voluntary Service 14 World War One (the Great War, 1914–18) 7, 11, 13, 25, 47 World War Two (1939–45) 13, 42 Zambia 15

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