Status
Available
Publication
Oxford : Heinemann, 1992
Description
Arthur Birling, a prosperous manufacturer in the early years of this century, is holding a family dinner party to celebrate his daughter's engagement. Into this cosy scene intrudes the harsh figure of a police inspector investigating the suicide of a young working-class woman, every member of the family turns out to have a shameful secret which links them with her death.
User reviews
LibraryThing member pgmcc
I read this play knowing nothing about it other than it involved a police inspector calling in on a well-to-do family dinner party and asking about a crime. What preconceptions I had led me to consider the story to be like Agatha Christie’s stories.
I was wrong. This play was much more serious and
This play was, and is, a wake up call for any of us who look down on people less well-off than ourselves, or who are rude and arrogant to others.
While today’s society and its greater awareness of human rights and labour protection laws date the play and prevent some of the blatant abuse described, there are still valuable lessons for society in the three acts of this work.
I was wrong. This play was much more serious and
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deals with the abuse of vulnerable people in society by the better off.This play was, and is, a wake up call for any of us who look down on people less well-off than ourselves, or who are rude and arrogant to others.
While today’s society and its greater awareness of human rights and labour protection laws date the play and prevent some of the blatant abuse described, there are still valuable lessons for society in the three acts of this work.
Show Less
LibraryThing member bullfinch
Great social comment with a twist at the end.
LibraryThing member StEdwardsCollege
The Heinemann Plays series offers contemporary drama and classic plays in durable classroom editions. Many have large casts and an equal mix of boy and girl parts. In this play an inspector interrupts a party to investigate a girl's suicide, and implicates each of the party-makers in her death.
LibraryThing member jburlinson
The film version is an absolute pip, with a great part (the title role) for the wonderful Alastair Sim. The play itself is a little lumpy as it loftily surveys one member of a family after another and finds each more wretched than the last.
LibraryThing member Nandakishore_Varma
The proscenium stage has a romance of its own. You, the spectator, is actually a Peeping Tom, staring into the lives of total strangers through the invisible fourth wall. And what lives! For on the stage, time and space are usually compressed or telescoped according to the whims and fancies of the
J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls uses the advantages (and limitations) of the proscenium stage to the maximum extent possible: to produce a play which is a very good mystery (in the Agatha Christie tradition), a social statement (very much like Ibsen) and a final twist which takes it into the realm of fantasy. I read the play, then watched the BBC adaptation… you have to see it performed to appreciate the power packed into ninety minutes of stage-time.
The Birlings (the industrialist Arthur Birling, his wife Sybil, daughter Sheila and son Eric) are having a quiet little dinner at their home to celebrate Sheila’s engagement to Gerald Croft, son of Sir George and Lady Croft. Gerald is also present. For Arthur Birling, the occasion is doubly joyful, as Birling and Company are the less powerful competitors of Crofts Limited, and the marriage will mean a profitable business deal as well as a social coup d’état. It is the pre-World War I era, and Birling is acutely consciousness of his social backwardness-something he is trying hard to rectify through his financial and political clout. He has been rather successful as he hints to Gerald, because a knighthood is on the way.
Into this haven of bourgeois comfort and security walks in Inspector Goole, unannounced, and goes about destroying it piece by piece. He is apparently there to conduct an enquiry into the suicide of a girl, Eva Smith, who has been admitted into the infirmary after drinking disinfectant. According to the inspector, the Birlings have a hand in the girl’s death. Initially Birling is haughty and superior; being still “on the bench” and a friend of Chief Constable Colonel Roberts, he can afford to be short with a mere inspector. Goole, however, goes about his business ruthlessly and ultimately succeeds in grinding them down, one by one.
It comes out that the girl has been mistreated by all of them. Birling initially fired her from his factory for organising a strike; Sheila got her dismissed from her subsequent job at a dress shop out of pure jealousy and Gerald “kept” her for a year at a friend’s flat, after picking her up from a bar which she was frequenting in her desperation. This last revelation leads to Sheila breaking off her engagement, and Gerald goes out to be alone for a while. But the Birling’s evening of woe is far from over.
Inspector Goole establishes that a couple of weeks before, Eva Smith had approached Mrs. Birling in her capacity of the chairman of a charitable society. She was pregnant and in desperate need of assistance. Initially she had lied that she was a married woman and that her name was Birling (!); however, the truth soon came out that the baby was out of wedlock. Eva did not want to approach her lover because he was an immature boy who is an alcoholic and had stolen money to support her. Mrs. Birling, however, was adamant that the baby’s father must be made solely responsible, and succeeded to influence the society to turn her out without a penny.
However much the inspector bullies her, Mrs. Birling is adamant – now that the woman has committed suicide, her lover must be dealt with very severely. Then Goole drops his final bomb: the culprit is none other than Eric, her son, an accusation which the young man accepts. He also admits stealing money from his father’s firm.
The family is in a total shambles now: a son who has committed adultery and theft, a daughter whose engagement has ended the same day it started and a father in the hope of a knighthood, faced with public scandal and disgrace. Eric is almost ready to murder his mother, because as he says, she is “responsible for the death of her own grandchild”. It is at this point that the inspector begins to behave very peculiarly. After rubbing in the fact that they all have got blood on their hands, he makes this speech and leaves.
One Eva Smith has gone… but there are 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, with 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 do not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. We don’t live alone. Good night.
It is into the situation that Gerald comes back, and he comes with some welcome information – he has just confirmed that there is no Inspector Goole in the police department! With cold logic, he establishes that they have no reason to believe that the girl in each of the incidents mentioned by Goole is the same one – true, he produced a photograph, but it was shown to each of them individually. The hoax is confirmed when they call the infirmary and confirm that there has been no suicide that night.
It is time for a pat on the back for Gerald, a sigh of relief from Mrs. And Mr. Birling, and a jolly round of drinks. Sheila and Eric, though initially reluctant to return to “normalcy” are on the way to being persuaded when the phone rings.
It is from the infirmary. A girl has just died on the way there after drinking disinfectant, and a policeman is on the way to question them… and the curtain descends.
***
The depth of the play is truly amazing. Only when we encounter the conversation again can we understand its depth, and how cleverly it is constructed. The story takes off smoothly from a drawing room farce to a darkly philosophical tragicomedy, which is sure to draw the viewers into the middle of it without them noticing: and to leave them drained at the end.
Highly recommended.
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playwright. Passions are exaggerated on purpose, and action proceeds at an unbelievable pace; all the while retaining the semblance of normality (this is not essential for an arena stage, where the unreality of the situation is accepted by the audience from the start). The denouement is usually explosive, and you leave the theatre emotionally drained.J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls uses the advantages (and limitations) of the proscenium stage to the maximum extent possible: to produce a play which is a very good mystery (in the Agatha Christie tradition), a social statement (very much like Ibsen) and a final twist which takes it into the realm of fantasy. I read the play, then watched the BBC adaptation… you have to see it performed to appreciate the power packed into ninety minutes of stage-time.
Into this haven of bourgeois comfort and security walks in Inspector Goole, unannounced, and goes about destroying it piece by piece. He is apparently there to conduct an enquiry into the suicide of a girl, Eva Smith, who has been admitted into the infirmary after drinking disinfectant. According to the inspector, the Birlings have a hand in the girl’s death. Initially Birling is haughty and superior; being still “on the bench” and a friend of Chief Constable Colonel Roberts, he can afford to be short with a mere inspector. Goole, however, goes about his business ruthlessly and ultimately succeeds in grinding them down, one by one.
It comes out that the girl has been mistreated by all of them. Birling initially fired her from his factory for organising a strike; Sheila got her dismissed from her subsequent job at a dress shop out of pure jealousy and Gerald “kept” her for a year at a friend’s flat, after picking her up from a bar which she was frequenting in her desperation. This last revelation leads to Sheila breaking off her engagement, and Gerald goes out to be alone for a while. But the Birling’s evening of woe is far from over.
Inspector Goole establishes that a couple of weeks before, Eva Smith had approached Mrs. Birling in her capacity of the chairman of a charitable society. She was pregnant and in desperate need of assistance. Initially she had lied that she was a married woman and that her name was Birling (!); however, the truth soon came out that the baby was out of wedlock. Eva did not want to approach her lover because he was an immature boy who is an alcoholic and had stolen money to support her. Mrs. Birling, however, was adamant that the baby’s father must be made solely responsible, and succeeded to influence the society to turn her out without a penny.
However much the inspector bullies her, Mrs. Birling is adamant – now that the woman has committed suicide, her lover must be dealt with very severely. Then Goole drops his final bomb: the culprit is none other than Eric, her son, an accusation which the young man accepts. He also admits stealing money from his father’s firm.
The family is in a total shambles now: a son who has committed adultery and theft, a daughter whose engagement has ended the same day it started and a father in the hope of a knighthood, faced with public scandal and disgrace. Eric is almost ready to murder his mother, because as he says, she is “responsible for the death of her own grandchild”. It is at this point that the inspector begins to behave very peculiarly. After rubbing in the fact that they all have got blood on their hands, he makes this speech and leaves.
One Eva Smith has gone… but there are 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, with 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 do not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. We don’t live alone. Good night.
It is into the situation that Gerald comes back, and he comes with some welcome information – he has just confirmed that there is no Inspector Goole in the police department! With cold logic, he establishes that they have no reason to believe that the girl in each of the incidents mentioned by Goole is the same one – true, he produced a photograph, but it was shown to each of them individually. The hoax is confirmed when they call the infirmary and confirm that there has been no suicide that night.
It is time for a pat on the back for Gerald, a sigh of relief from Mrs. And Mr. Birling, and a jolly round of drinks. Sheila and Eric, though initially reluctant to return to “normalcy” are on the way to being persuaded when the phone rings.
It is from the infirmary. A girl has just died on the way there after drinking disinfectant, and a policeman is on the way to question them… and the curtain descends.
***
The depth of the play is truly amazing. Only when we encounter the conversation again can we understand its depth, and how cleverly it is constructed. The story takes off smoothly from a drawing room farce to a darkly philosophical tragicomedy, which is sure to draw the viewers into the middle of it without them noticing: and to leave them drained at the end.
Highly recommended.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Lukerik
I saw this performed some years ago with Julian Glover playing Arthur Birling. Star Wars fans will know who I mean. For everyone else, he's the man who chooses poorly at the end of Indiana Jones. At the start you watched the family at the table through the windows of their house and when the
For everything that you lose through just reading the script, you gain in the time you have to pause and consider the implications of what's going on. This is not a play beloved of the Tories. It's about guilt and responsibility. According to the introduction, critics at the time were confused as to exactly what the Inspector was. They haven't been reading their Aeschylus. He is The Furies, displaced in time. Anachronistic it may be, but you'll notice the play obeys dramatic unity.
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Inspector arrived the whole set opened out.For everything that you lose through just reading the script, you gain in the time you have to pause and consider the implications of what's going on. This is not a play beloved of the Tories. It's about guilt and responsibility. According to the introduction, critics at the time were confused as to exactly what the Inspector was. They haven't been reading their Aeschylus. He is The Furies, displaced in time. Anachronistic it may be, but you'll notice the play obeys dramatic unity.
Show Less
LibraryThing member eglinton
The Edwardian drawing room of smug, satisfied haves is rattled by the disruptions of new classes and technologies and connections, all unravelling in the 20th century maelstrom that Priestley and his peers witnessed, and ushered in. Entertaining, artfully conveyed, albeit with a simplistic, rather
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preachy tone. Hard to read now without pondering current parallels. Do we now see the same with our 21st century technocratic prosperity under onslaught, as the loss of faith in our comfortable conventions spirals forth? Inspect thyselves, Priestley was doubtless warning his audience, even three decades on, when that disruption was finally settling down, and perhaps that same warning is due today, as once again society and culture realign. Show Less
LibraryThing member MickyFine
The Birling family are celebrating the engagement of their daughter when an inspector arrives at their door announcing the suicide of a local girl. As the evening unfolds, the entire party realizes that they played a role in the girl's descent.
This audio drama features Toby Jones as the inspector
This audio drama features Toby Jones as the inspector
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who makes for a powerful accuser as he slowly unravels the mystery. While the denouement feels a bit preach-y, there's plenty to enjoy here. Show Less
Original publication date
1946-10-01
1945
Physical description
xiii, 79 p.; 21 cm
ISBN
0435232827 / 9780435232825