An Inspector Calls
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J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls is one of the perennial ‘old chestnuts’ of English Literature courses. In this regard, it’s not quite to the standard of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men with the GCSE-ruining *spoiler alert* “George Kills Lennie” written in almost every school copy, but it’s a close one. Generations of fourteen-to-sixteen-year-olds have sat in dingy classrooms and pored over the not-so-subtle subtleties of Priestley’s socialist views and the tactless foreshadowing of the now-infamous “fire blood and anguish” speech.
As intellectually stimulating as this is and while I’m certain that it provides a world-class education in collective responsibility, denial and the thousands of other themes that permeate the play (at least in the eyes of our tireless and beloved educators), it can rather detract from the pleasure of reading or performing it and obscure the truth itself – that this is a very, very entertaining play. It possesses the right mix of down-to-earth drama and slightly supernatural suspense, and finds the right balance between tried-and-tested stock characters and true innovation. Through contrition (Sheila), punctiliousness (Mrs Birling) or just plain squiffiness (Eric), the figures of the play manage to be human and realistic, while the eponymous Inspector Goole moves between chilling coldness and rather convivial good humour. Mr Birling is bloated and arrogant, and it is here that Priestley manages to use true needlepoint satire. The playwright, in rather an interesting juxtaposition to his socialist views, has taken the very upper-class concept of the turn-of-the-century “drawing-room play” and twisted it into something new entirely – many of the characters are the same but the plot is truly different. The scenes between Birling and Goole, too, can be anything from chuckleworthy to downright hilarious: the natures of the two men, Birling’s self-righteousness and Goole’s cold matter-of-factness, clash irrevocably in Priestley’s sharp dialogue. The audience (or reader) can derive genuine glee from the downfall of the pompous traditionalist elder Birlings, and not to forget the thrilling suspense and mystery of the play’s ending.
In any event, it is all too easy with prolonged analysis of stage directions and line rhythm to forget the fact that this is a play written to entertain. Perhaps if students were given more opportunities to remember this, they wouldn’t hate it so much after their exams.