An Inspector Calls Review
At one point, both of us were very familiar with An Inspector Calls as we studied it for GCSEs, but never got the chance to see it whilst we needed to. So, when we found out that it was going to be performed at a local theatre, we decided we had to go. Tickets were booked and we began to wait.
Neither of us have read the play since we finished studying it, and so, when we sat down to dinner beforehand we tried to create a plot summary from the memories of five years ago. This is what we came up with.
Sometime in the 1910s, an Inspector, Goole, arrives at a rich family’s home to investigate the suicide of a pregnant girl. The family don’t care all too much as the girl was poor and it isn’t their fault if she killed herself. The Inspector gets each of the family members to reveal that they played a part in the girl’s hardships. The father fired her, the daughter got her fired from another job, the mother refused her charity, the son got her pregnant and the fiance kept her as his mistress for a few months.
We were quite pleased how well we remembered the play, for that, is roughly what happens, just a bit more detailed. So, we sat down to watch the play in a theatre filled with GCSE students, teachers and parents who had been dragged along and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.
The socialist message of the play is still very much relevant today and the play really highlighted it by the use of set, special effects, and minimal props. The set featured a house that opened like a dolls house and a cobbled street outside. The house and the street being on different levels also highlighted the message as Inspector Goole never set foot in the house and the characters that truly understood his message ended the play on the cobbles.
At the end of the play, there was a divide between the older and the younger generation, which was amplified through their positions on stage and their outfits. The older generation started and finished the show in their dark coloured dinner wear, whilst the younger generation finished the show dishevelled and wearing white. This light versus dark visual was impactful and helped the audience to understand that the understanding was permanent.
The divide between the Birlings and the rest of the characters was also shown by the eras of which their costumes were from. Inspector Goole and the extras were all dressed in clothing from the 1940s which, this adaptation, made them seem like they were looking back on the attitudes of the 1910s and wishing they could change the past. Inspector Goole’s warning about ‘fire and blood’ is also widely interpreted as the Blitz.
All An Inspector Calls posts can’t be finished without theorising who or what Inspector Goole is, so here are our favourite theories. Inspector Goole is a ghost or some other supernatural entity come to warn the Birlings about the future if they don’t change their way, a little similar to The Christmas Carol’s three ghosts. This theory is supported by the Inspector’s name Goole, a misspelling of ghoul and that he knows too much about the Birlings and a suicide that hadn’t yet happened. The second theory and the one the play helped cement in our minds was that Inspector Goole was the baby of Eva Smith, saved even as his mother died. He then grew up reading his mother’s diary and then witnessing World War I and II and goes back to change things starting with the Birling family.
Overall, we enjoyed the play and couldn’t stop talking about it on our way home. We both said that we very much wished we had had the chance to see this when we were studying it as it would have helped greatly. However, we probably enjoyed the play more now, years after studying it, because we aren’t trying to guess J.B. Priestley’s intentions and how things can be interpreted. It’s something we would go and see again.
M🌸 and C🌙
